2,460 karma · joined May 10, 2019
(Incidentally, at least in my opinion his three novels are his finest work, but they seem to attract much less popular attention than his short stories and novellas.)
Strangely enough, this is a good reason for preferring cast iron over Teflon! Cast iron is close to indestructible, whereas with PTFE or other non-stick coatings one is constantly worried about scratching.
Indian Railways is a state owned enterprise - a very large one. Until recently, India's central government released two annual financial statements (budgets) each year: one for railways, and the second for everything else.
One way to look at it is that people of a certain generation eschew spaces because the tools of their formative years simply couldn't handle spaces - but another is that the olds have learned that generally erring on the side of KISS ("Keep it simple, stupid!") isn't a bad idea.
So does this mean we should be trucking tomatoes long distance? Not at all. People should eat whatever fresh produce grows locally, and supplement with canned or fermented foods that capture the benefits of faraway and out-of-season crops without the downside of wastage and shelf-life optimization.
We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter.
Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves.
That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.
Background: India went from colonialism-induced massive serial famines to self-sufficiency and then some, while entirely eschewing GM foods. (NB: this doesn't mean there is no malnutrition in India, where inequalities are rife, but it means that the country as a whole is able to produce more than needed. The causes of hunger are non-intuitive; for e.g. the dumping of cheap foods is more likely to cause hunger than solve it, as hunger stems from poverty which stems from economic disablement - which is caused by dumping cheap foods.)
Now, the Green Revolution did result in a loss of biodiversity (among other problems) but without creating the kind of monocultures you see in the US. For example, there are still numerous varieties of rice in India, especially locally variated.
Despite this, the Indian government has been increasingly warming over recent years to introducing GM foods (which is largely a solution in search of a problem, in the Indian context). The threat from GM foods is almost always misunderstood. It is not about the individual health effects of eating GM foods; it is about the largescale replacement of a system where farmers own their biodiverse seed, with a top down monocultural approach that essentially makes farmers franchisees of a massive corporate behemoth and eliminates biodiversity, putting all eggs in one basket.
Data scientist here. The above is not the correct takeaway from Simpson's paradox. It is not generally correct that the trends seen in subdivided groups are closer to truth than overall groups; sometimes the opposite is the case. It depends entirely on what the divisions are and whether they make sense.
With regard to gender-based pay disparity, there are a multiplicity of factors, from the most obvious ("equal pay for equal work") to other factors such as the fact that professions largely staffed by women tend to get paid less than professions largely staffed by men. For instance childcare is miserably compensated, despite being a position of high responsibility and impact.
The consensus regarding women during the pandemic (not limited to tech workers) was that women have disproportionately sacrificed their careers to cover the needs of childcare and at-home schooling during the pandemic.
The net-neutral solution is for ISPs/telecoms to not spam-block, but rather have spam-blocking be an optional, additional, layer that the consumer can choose at will, or not have at all. But the problem with that solution is that it requires the consumer to do extra work to obtain spam protection, and the consumer would not be protected by default. It also means extra work by all parties delivering spam messages. Unless spam ceases or things otherwise change, I think the clunky solution we currently have is fine for the most part.
The data appear to disagree with you: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010_homicide_rates_...
* Palestine: the end of the Mandate and the 1947-1949 Palestine war saw largescale displacement, loss of life, and (as is obvious to everyone) once again a deadly and unshakeable polarization between peoples that persists to this day.
On the one hand, it is certainly true that the British did not intend for these consequences, but on the other, the British were fully in charge as the sovereign government of India and Mandatory Palestine (unlike the US in Vietnam or even Afghanistan) - in particular having ruled India for over three centuries by the time they left - and so more deserving of blame.
Think about it: if smart kids benefit from a more personalized, stimulating, and nurturing approach to education, then this is even more true for the kids who are less intelligent. Why do we assume that the kids who are academically behind are well served by an apathetic, inflexible, impersonal system?
For example, consider very small classes taught by highly trained, highly motivated, highly paid teachers - but instead of having this be the solution for an elite cohort of "smart" kids, let this be the solution for all kids.
You're directing blame at the doctor, but it's the insurance company making the rules, not the doctor.
But - perhaps more relevant to the HN audience - I have noticed a surprising amount of financial illiteracy among the tech-savvy middle-to-wealthy class as well. A lunchtime conversation with my coworkers showed that most put more faith in their own instincts with picking stocks than in index or mirror funds (something that evidence shows is very unlikely, but people like to believe). Another time, I found that a majority of my coworkers were filing their stock-option taxes incorrectly.
Though no doubt wealthy folks are more literate (including financial literacy) than the poor, my suspicion is that most of the difference in financial outcomes comes to the fact that poor people simply have less capacity to save than middle/wealthy, and more severely feel the impacts of poor decision making.
The point is that plastic takes many centuries to degrade, and we go through a lot of single-use plastic. For example, a disposable diaper takes >500 years to biodegrade.
It's nice to imagine all this plastic going into walled-off landfills that protect the rest of the earth and water from being contaminated, but in practice this is a myth. US localities are seeing an unsustainably growing amount of plastic contamination in local waterways and beaches, some of it visible, some of it not.
Incidentally, this doesn't mean you need to use a single-use paper bag instead of a single-use plastic bag. Instead, use a durable bag made out of any material you like. The phrase is "reduce -> reuse -> recycle". Recycling was never meant to be the foremost part of our sustainability efforts.
That's quite true, and the same statement also points to where the arithmetic mean isn't a good choice: where the goal isn't so much to summarize a whole as to give an insight into populations. For instance, if you are trying to figure out the "average" income in a city, the median provides better intuition than the mean.
Furthermore, there are many situations where both the mean and median (and even the mode) fail to provide insight. For instance, the average person has one testicle, whether defined by mean or median (and even the mode is not much help here, with its equally useless value of 0). We should really think of summary stats as something to only be used when a distribution is well understood. In other cases, a simple frequency distribution diagram provides much better insight, and isn't very hard to do.
Nocco's uncontested re-election in 2016 is indicative of the sheriff's popularity, his political prowess and the county's continued tilt to the right, which puts Democrats at a decided disadvantage during general elections. Pasco's current registration numbers show the Republican Party with a 21,000-voter advantage over Democrats.
"I'm incredibly blessed that the citizens have so much faith in what we're doing,'' Nocco said about an uncontested re-election.
(https://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/local/sheriff-nine-ot...)
In short, no improvement can be expected when the voters themselves support this kind of authoritarian overreach and curtailment of human rights.