zahma

I think you’re giving way too much credit to medical associations to rig the game in their favor. They exert enough influence over all fifty states and the various private institutions to systemically deny training to qualified candidates?

The fact is it’s extremely expensive and time consuming to train physicians. There isn’t enough space. Third and fourth year med students are going to far-flung hospitals to have hands-on experience because staying in the larger cities means they’re competing for access to training with residents.

All of this factors in to the cost and limited space of med school classes. It’s sad, but we would have to reinvent how we train physicians to address the limitations.

No need to panic. I also use a Zerowater filter. I'd be worried about drinking distilled water after exercising or in high heat because it can lead to hyponatremia -- low blood sodium levels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise-associated_hyponatrem...). Because your body is sweating, you're losing a lot of salt that your body needs. Drinking distilled water will pull even more solute out of those cells as the solute chases water (i.e. the cells are hypertonic) until its in steady state, but of course it needs to replenish what has been

However, during normal daily activity and by eating, you're supplementing your body with enough salt (and other solutes) to compensate for what isn't in your distilled water.

Now it's a totally different question whether we're getting PFAs out of our water with the Zerowater filters. That should rightfully incite some panic.

The city started during the pandemic and has moved toward making these bike lanes more permanent. There is also a deep dissatisfaction with public transportation here. While comprehensive throughout the entirety of the Paris metropolitan, it is expensive, unreliable (especially the regional RER trains that connect the inner city to suburbs and vital for commuters), often filthy, and at times unsafe (depending on the line). The other issue is the traffic above ground. I've heard reports that there are fewer cars, but it doesn't feel this way. If anything, there are more delivery trucks.

So while infrastructure investment has helped (not to mention some nice tax write-offs and discounts on e-bikes), there are some other issues here. I like bikeable Paris a lot, but the ecological goals of this city's mayor demand much more investment in the city and regional authority's mass transit. It is unreasonable to expect commuters to bike in from many kilometers away. Biking inside Paris upon arrival should be the desired end result. Ultimately to get the cars off the roads, people need to feel good on mass transit so that they want to use it more than a car, and the impression I have right now is that many people are biking because it's better than sweating in filthy, delayed trains.

To that effect, riding a bike is and should be a delight -- not a mere alternative to defunct metro transit, but I know many who are terrorized or disgruntledby biking in Paris. To solve this intractable issue of getting more riders, cars have to be removed from the streets which need to be progressively closed to make room for more bike infrastructure. These kinds of plans well face strident criticism and backlash from the suburbanite commuters. In that vein, I am totally for the Grand Paris Express plan. Make Paris great for Parisians again!

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

I try Orion once in a while when my Firefox configuration breaks a website. I actually enjoy it and appreciate the zero telemetry and functionality with both Google and Firefox plugin marketplaces. It’s also great for my laptop’s battery life. Firefox can drain that quickly depending on which tabs I keep open.

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite. Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators.

In a hierarchy of urban planning, I’d favor removing space for cars over demolishing precious space for affordable housing. To that effect, I wouldn’t point to Haussmann who bulldozed plenty of homes and neighborhoods for his unified vision of Paris connected by major thoroughfares. As a result, we have few parks and the city lacks any kind of real arboreal shelter except on some of the boulevards. He was a visionary, but he didn’t have scientific papers or the threat of climate change to contend with.

The idea I have in mind is that the control over cities has been wrested from its citizens. A special car commuting class has more comfort moving about a city like Paris than regular inhabitants — but at what cost and borne by whom? Removing space for cars means removing vehicles, which re-empowers city-dwellers, cleans the air, and cools the city.

I hope this isn’t a revelation to anyone at this point. Of course greenery reduces heat, but more than anything it means removing concrete, which mitigates the urban heat island effect. (Urban heat islands absorb heat energy during the day, amplifying extremes, and release heat at night, making it impossible for effective cooling.) And yet there is still so much resistance or otherwise apathy to the idea of planting more trees and removing space for vehicles — as if it’s merely some hippy-dippy shit only good for gentrification.

Not sure what your point is. You can remove an intersection, plant trees, and put a footpath or bike lane through it. The point is precisely to downsize roads. It would make it safer for pedestrians too.

“At this point, the researchers also realized that the heat could inadvertently melt the adhesive cellophane and cause the flaming SPTs to suddenly eject from the toaster. Unfortunately, this did not occur.”

That made me laugh out loud. This research paper could make for a pretty good intro to scientific writing example for any of your 101s.

Part of the reason cities are hostile is due to their un-greenness. For every street that bisects a block, consider how many trees could go there. Then consider what that would afford the local ecosystem. Then consider the reduction in noise, the reduction of heat in the hottest months, the reduction in pollution, and the increase in beauty. Of course, less connective tissue also makes for less ease of driving, and so the battle inches forward to returning cities to its citizens.

Making space for more green is good for us precisely because it makes cities less hostile perhaps in a more roundabout way.

Firefox Relay is a handy assistant to at least stymie email tracking and is neatly integrated with the browser. The free tier gets you a few masked emails that forward to your actual inbox. You can't reply through the masked email without paying, but that might not be necessary for all.

It feels like retaining some semblance of privacy is a losing battle. Data clean rooms are industry standard now and many companies happily share their bounties with others for profit. That appears to be the future along with consolidating businesses based on data-driven insights for demographics. How are these kinds of practices still legal? When does data collection and sharing become such a glaring issue that constitutional rights can be invoked in a landmark lawsuit? Or can we expect anti-trust suits to limit companies hoarding vast repositories of data?

It feels naive to ask these questions, but they're fundamental to societal health and progress, democracy, and arguably the planet.

https://relay.firefox.com/

They do manage to filter inorganic solids, but I’m not sure about microplastics. I assumed they did, but they’re hesitant to say on their site. Perhaps I mistakenly assumed that if they can eliminate PFAs from water, microplastics are also removable.

Start here: https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2020/p...

The answer is yes, and it is absolutely important. If plastics disrupt our endocrine system, then that touches every facet of our bodies from development, sexual health, mental health, disease, and more. We can’t underestimate the effects plastic exposure has on our health.

ZeroWater makes a carafe that reduces total dissolved solids to 0 ppm, including PFAs and microplastics, or so they claim. I have tested it with two different monitors, and it is indeed 0 ppm, which is good enough to be considered distilled water by the FDA. The filter does not sustain that level of efficiency for very long if there are lots of solids to clog it (i.e. ymmv depending on your water source. Some people prefilter, but who has space and time for that?). I’m not sure it’s capable of filtering to the nanometer scale, but then again I’m not sure anything can, which is why this is so frightening for life forms.

Other devices you can install with some rudimentary plumbing knowledge are BWT or Pentaire reverse osmosis filters. They do a good enough job at filtering, though they waste a lot of water in the process. I use these at work and I the Pentaire allows you to control ppm, which is suitable for coffee aficionados. You can always remineralize your water once you get the junk out.

Thinly-veiled payola as the threat of free filing looms large over their extortionate business model. I don’t doubt there are some good use cases for TurboTax, but for the vast majority of tax filers, it’s excessive. Perhaps if the tax code wasn’t Byzantine and broken there’d be less of a case to make. Of course, TurboTax and filing firms have much reason to deter tax code simplification in addition to thwarting free filing[1].

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...

It doesn’t seem like the pirates who were described in the article were behind any kind of proxy, which is why the ISP Frontier repeatedly wrote them to desist. They were pirating on the clearnet without any obfuscation. Pretty dumb and easily the lowest hanging fruit for copyright enforcement.

Using Tor for streaming or large downloads probably won’t result in great quality or quick speeds. Using Tor for browsing and seeding on private torrent trackers is also typically banned for security reasons.

What a silly idea. Universities are not just in charge with academic education but rather with the formation of a person’s character. To succeed with the latter, academic capability must be held alongside the estimation of one’s character, for it is not only about one’s intellectual capacity but rather how one uses it.

"When we cease to understand the world" is phenomenal. With that out of the way, I got a kick out of this not-a-profile-profile piece. A little bit of mystery and intrigue is healthy, and it certainly works for his writing style. I'm also totally fascinated by authors who are totally bilingual. Even in translation, "When we cease to understand the world" became one of my instant favorites, which adds even more excitement to The MANIAC. I've never read anything like "When we cease..." that blends science, biography, fiction so seamlessly into something bedazzling. Highly recommended for anyone perusing these forums.

The biggest shock is that we still put the burden of proof on science to demonstrate the extent to which food chains are disrupted by isolated uses of pesticides, as if habitat fragmentation, global warming, land use change, pollution, water table pollution and change, overpopulation, etc. doesn’t all tie in. We are so, so myopic.

It’s about time the burden of proof falls on chemical companies to show their products don’t do such tremendous damage, instead of leaving it to be discovered and reported in already obliterated ecosystems.

Can someone explain to me why this is being treated like a watershed moment? Obviously I know there's a lot of money tied up in OpenAI through Microsoft, but why should the street care about any of these backroom activities? Aren't we still going to get the same research and product either at MS or OpenAI?

Surprised it’s actually symmetrical. Though I’ve never understood why, it’s always perplexed and irritated me that they typically offer upload bandwidth at a tenth of download. In the day and age of remote work, you’d think this would be illegal.

You must not have read the article all the way through: the problem — if we can call it that — is a decrease in consumption but not in viniculture, hence the issue of a market glut.

I do not know which kinds of wine are to be destroyed, but I’d hazard a guess that it isn’t the kind that ages well.

Amazingly useful resource even today. Because bikes are timeless, a vintage model might only be serviceable with the help of an experienced mechanic or Sheldon Brown’s site. I’m exaggerating since there clearly are other fora of knowledge and advice, but how did those contributors learn? Many roads lead back to Sheldon Brown’s site.

I had this same thought, but given the blatant profiling of the China Initiative for four years —- to say nothing of other social prejudices, it might not have taken so much pressure but rather a gentle nudge to consider one’s environment.

I don’t doubt there’s been some interference by the Chinese government. I’m just not sure they could run a full-on scare tactics campaign without it blowing up.

Your comment is disingenuous. While there are certainly many businesses who do not undertake sustainability efforts in earnest or at all, we (as consumers) have to want companies to try. Otherwise they are even further disincentivized to make an effort. I agree that it’s a bad look when a Nestle company can obtain a B Corp score, but that’s not to discredit the entire program.

B Corp certifying makes a critical distinction for consumers. Is it a panacea for climate crises? Of course not. Will it single-handedly fix profit-incentivized business models that exploit natural resources? Of course not. It’s a start, and you shouldn’t assume that all companies undertaking its certification are merely greenwashing.

You could try to make the argument that enabling greenwashing is detrimental to them environmentalism effort, but then I’d have to get a sense for what you think is a meaningful step toward adjusting business practices.

This site is a solid way of seeking work at a good company or being a responsible consumer.

When I was looking for work in environmental policy around 2016/18, I looked at this tool and it was sparsely populated. Now it feels like many companies have made attempts to conform to the standards, which is no simple feat, especially for multi-nationals.

It’s exciting to see alternate means of assessing value in a company. Such an evaluation is essential if we want to rethink classical economics and value companies who add value to their employees, the earth, or sustainable practices.

I didn’t even know this word existed until I started reading along in HN threads.

And so Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake tech campus vision begins. It’s frightening to think that as the world becomes increasingly hostile and inhospitable, especially in California, that company store villages like this will become sanctuaries made possible from the insane value derived from the masses’s data.

It is like that in France too, and it’s especially disturbing since it’s aimed at young people.

Sounds like you were fortunate to have multiple people around, an AED nearby, and someone well-trained. You’re probably right that AED helped prevent physical damage, though that may also be due to good technique and or your anatomy. The sooner that the AED goes on and restarts sinus rhythm, the fewer compressions required.

Happy to hear you are doing better.