wavegeek

I can't see any other reference to this but there is a whole field of study on this. See e.g. https://www.amazon.com.au/Cost-Disease-Computers-Cheaper-Hea... or google "cost disease".

One thing I have noticed is the incredible increase in the cost of regulatory compliance over the years.

It can take years to get the dozens to hundreds of approvals needed. Vast armies of people are needed to document and monitor compliance.

At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects.

There is a rapid cheap test for covid-19 infection. It consists of checking whether a person has cold/flu symptoms and/or a temperature over 37.5.

This test may sound ridiculous but it is part of the reason why Taiwan has had hardly any deaths from the virus and yet did not have to have a lockdown.

In Taiwan, checks are made at entrance to work, school, transport, shops. Those who have symptoms as above are excluded. This, combined with other measures (below) has been enough to produce successful control of the disease.

Some numbers Country, deaths/million, GDP fall Q2/2020

Taiwan,0.3,-0.6

Australia,35,-7.0

Germany,158,-11.2

Sweden,167,-8.3

USA,767,-9.6

Belgium,1278,-14.5

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy

Measures Taiwan took

1. Close borders as hard as possible very early.

2. Strictly and competently managed mandatory quarantine of overseas arrivals.

3. Mandatory facemasks. Initially supplies were rationed until supplied caught up.

4. Health checks as above.

5. Competently managed contact tracing.

Some of this strategy may be difficult to duplicate in certain countries. See the steps with the word "competent" included.

Also the Taiwanese public appear to trust the government's competence and good intentions, something that does not seem to be true in some other countries.

Yes I read that report and was not convinced. One anecdote. Not in a peer reviewed journal etc.

If you do take Vitamin D, variant D3 is by far best, and it may be wise to take vitamin K2 as well to avoid calcium metabolism issues (calcification).

As with this study the dose used is often quite low, driven by paranoia about overdoses. Other studies have been very short term, had small numbers of subjects and thus would only find very large effects, or used large irregular "bolus" doses which are very bad and no longer used.

I went through one meta-analysis and found only 3 of about 35 studies that were actually useful. So take a close look at the methods section of the paper. You don't just read the abstract, do you? Do you?

Why 600 IU / day is not enough:

1. Meta-analysis that concluded this was faulty due to back statistical analysis and understated need by a large factor Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472-4475; doi:10.3390/nu6104472 "A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D" by Paul J. Veugelers and John Paul Ekwaru

2. Lactating women who get only the RDA have vitamin D deficient milk. This makes no sense if the RDA is valid

3. When people go out in the sun their bodies produce up to 10,000 IU per day but not more. Why produce all that Vit D if it is not useful?

Sorry I am away from my paper trove so I do not have the cites for 2 and 3.

> i wonder how much is survivorship bias

Here is one anecdata. When my daughter was 14 I taught her a Lisp and then a traditional programming language. She found the random syntax of the trad formatted language bizarre.

> s-expressions are kind of hard to read and reason about for my brain

I think it's likely this is just a matter of familiarity.

Like the way that people think the Windows (/ whatever) GUI is intuitive - but when you test this by putting someone who has never used it in front of a screen, it actually isn't. "What do you mean if I write something and don't also 'save' it, whatever that is, it will disappear? This is supposed to be better than paper...".

The text editor handles indenting and matching. After a while it is completely transparent.

>I prefer a full size keyboard.

Also every laptop has a different - stupid - keyboard layout.

You take CO2 out of the air and turn it into oil / methane / elemental carbon using vast amounts of energy and some water and catalysts.

You then burn it, returning it to the atmosphere.

Net CO2 impact = zero.

This is a strange debate. They seem to be in violent agreement.

Great book that clearly explains the perils or inferring causation and now you can deal with them constructively.

For those who want more he has a more technical book "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference" which is also excellent.

Pearl is a legend in the field, who wrote the seminal "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference".

There is a school of thought that there is nothing new here. Pearl is very honest and open about who invented what and of the mistakes in his earlier work. While no one finding is entirely new here, the overall package adds up to a lot IMHO. And this after having intensively studied statistics and probability over many years. It really changed my approach to and understanding of causality. And most importantly it gave me reliable intuitions on the subject. After his books, things seem obvious to me that others struggle with.

I like his point about lack of ambiguity. Nothing makes me want to punch an author in the head (without, to be clear, any possibility I would actually do it) like lazily creating an ambiguous notation, which is supposed to be "clear from context", but rarely is. As for example the Einstein summation convention which is to be ignored "when clear from context".

I would add

1. Clearly telegraphing notations. Not hiding them in the middle of long paragraphs or even, and yes I have seen this a few times, defining essential notation in an optional exercise.

2. Having a glossary of notations, so people don't have to remember every single notation and to read every word of the book sequentially.

3. Not creating low value notations that may be used only once and then, possibly forgotten. I have read books with > 1 new notation or definition per page, mostly forgotten thereafter but some random subset needed later, and you are not to know which.

"Quotations allegedly of me on the internet are rarely legitimate" AlbertEinstein.

> there is a high chance that the person in question have already heard it.

This is so true. I speak as someone whose name prompts an obvious joke. People think they are so clever and witty, having come up with something I have heard hundreds of times before.

Hmm it appears that the cost figures cited are operational costs only and do not including the cost of capital and the cost of debt. If your operation just breaks even on operational costs, it does not have a long term future.

Look at all the big shale producers, their stock prices are top left to bottom right. Burning capital. This is not going to last and can only continue in the short term because of near-zero interest rates. Zero rates allow you to kick the can down the road .. for a while.

My model of these companies is that the product they are producing is not oil but the false promise of profits, sold to gullible stock buyers. Along the way some of the money is siphoned off as executive salaries and bonuses.

Reminiscent of many of the dot.com / dot.scam outfits back in the 1990s.

Given the (according to me) fact that many worlds (more aptly named the Relative State Interpretation) is true and correct, one can confidently predict that no "collapse" will be found. That, and the fact that people have been looking for actual collapse of the wave function for many decades.

> The wavefunction is a nonlocal variable!

Important point. It is quite unfair to say "nya nya local hidden variable theories cannot replicate QM", when QM is itself radically non-local.

> The correct formulation involves the subtle concept of decoherence.

The trouble is that decoherence only explains part of the story. With decoherence you end up with the probability density converging into multiple outcomes. But decoherence does not in any way explain that the choice is made to pick one of these outcomes.

As for what is wrong with QM, the main issue for me is the measurement process, which is just posited axiomatically. How measurement works should be explained by the theory but it is just posited. They assume a classical device that does the measurement. Decoherence explains bits of it but much is left hanging loose.

> QM is essentially deterministic.

No. The standard formulation of QM posits a measurement using a pseudo-classical device which generates a probabilistic outcome. This is at the very core. Source: any text on QM.

The wave function evolution is deterministic but that is only a part of the theory.

> "something they did in the past" suggests they have stopped doing it.

No it doesn't. All evidence of their proclivities is from the past. It means they have form, a record, of bad behaviour.

Remember how the use of the Tax File Number was going to be strictly limited? And have you noticed you cannot scratch your bum without quoting it now?

Mission creep is a thing.

My own impression from observing his public behaviour is that Scott Morrison is a lying liar who tells lies when convenient to himself.

Income tax was introduced as a "temporary measure" to pay for WWII.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

> open source code

The promise of open source code. Which is a very different thing.

Note that this government also promised to get rid of the budget deficit. But did not do so. They have told many other lies and have earned the right to be distrusted.

With this app, if I get the disease and authorise disclosure, it will disclose to government agents the people I have been in contact with. Or, to put it another way, the people who have been in contact with me. Without their consent or knowledge.

TLDR it is not confidential safe or secure.

> I'm pretty confident

powerful argument there, not.

With SARS1 there was continuing damage post 6 months.

Incentives matter

The trough of disillusion has arrived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

The big challenge for self driving cars is that they are held to a standard of perfection. No human driver can meet that standard either, but they are exempted due to incumbency bias.

The benefits of self driving cars are so phenomenally huge that if they are possible they will happen. Apart from the costs of paying people to drive, there are the time benefits of not wasting time driving cars - is there anything more boring and tedious? - and the fact many people, the young, the old, those with poor eyesight cannot drive.

I don't see any evidence it is not possible within 10-20 years. Cars will get smarter and easier to drive and the final step will not seem large. For the edge cases, there is always the possibility of having the vehicle temporarily being taken over by someone remote. Remote driving is already done in some mines.

Yes. Also look at the ingredients - the composition is very far from real meat in terms of nutrient value.

But if you think beyond meat is bad, try some vegan cheeses some time. I tried 3 and they all tasted like 6 parts soap, 1 part nail polish, and "hints" of cheese.

> Umm

Signaling of disdain and contempt not required.

> Cooking destroys like 99% of lectins.

Citation required.

> Its always broken down completely first

It's

Ummm

We are talking here about the lining of the digestive system. You know, the system that takes in whole foods and breaks them down. You bet the digestive system's walls are exposed to the proteins.

Yes there was recently an item on Amazon I wanted to buy. But could not as it was not listed on the local amazon.country. It ended up costing me 10X as much having it shipped from Europe to a friend in the USA and then here.

Enormous costs imposed on me and others for very little benefit.

Citation required.

I was on such a diet for many years and eventually gave up on it because I could not make it work in a healthy way.

Why?

Too many deficiencies. Example: Linseed oil /= DHA/EPA. Many or most people cannot make long chain Omega 3 fats in the quantity needed from vegetable "Omega 3" fats.

Too many anti-nutrients in plants.

Get on youtube and search "I used to be a vegan" for numerous cases like mine, health irreparably damaged.

Yes I have the same problem, also the fake meat products are often loaded with ridiculous amounts of salt.

The produce spiel claims reduced salt so it looks like this has been an issue with this product in the past.

Having looked at a few of these studies I found the following problems

1. Industry sponsorship. Which has been shown to produce wildly biased results.

2. Small, short term studies which can only find a "significant" (i.e. statistically significant) effect if the effect is large and immediate.

In some of the studies an effect showed up close to statistical significance but the headline was "no effect found"

3. I don't know about this one, but some analyses have found that a majority of review papers were ghost written by industry PR hacks who them paid professors to put their names on them.

I suggest read the papers closely and looking hard at sponsorship issues before believing them.

Also note that these studies were on adult men. There is every reason to suspect that the developing male fetus is orders of magnitude more vulnerable to environmental hormone disruptors of all kinds.