alfromspace's comments

Wait, been I've been told "you can't just shut down travel", and that closing borders doesn't work, for reasons that are completely self-evident. So I'm utterly mystified that there are virtually no cases and 0 deaths in countries like Russia and Mongolia that closed their borders.

"This is not an appeal to authority fallacy"

...yeah it is. Remdesivir has improved patient outcomes in the majority of cases it's been used so far - no, it hasn't been subject to comprehensive peer-reviewed study quite yet, but that's an awful reason to ignore our eyes in an emergent situation like this where death may be the alternative, and highly irresponsible for Derek Lowe to ignore. You're appealing to it being proper to ignore because authorities feel they haven't gone through enough red tape yet.

Am I wrong in observing that the public health response to the outbreak seems to be far less oriented towards solving the problem, but rather using psychological tactics to convince people that everything is fine, "the risk is low", and doing nothing is the proper response? (but also you're probably going to get the virus, so prepare for that, but only by washing your hands and certainly not preparing in a way that disrupts globalism)

How was the US doing as a nation when it was more exclusive?

No thanks. We don't need to cram every square mile full of people.

I agree - ran into this problem with my dad. He had a rare cancer that quickly stopped responding to hormone therapy (the only kind of treatment known to work), and deteriorated rapidly. We called Sloan Kettering to see if there were any clinical trials he could enroll in, but since my dad had recently become bedridden, he wasn't eligible for anything. I don't know if there was anything else I could have done - it seems like the argument of "he's dying and wants to try anything that has the slightest chance of working" was completely expected and unconvincing to them.

Then at his normal oncologist, a brand-new drug was recommended that only worked on cancers caused by NTRK gene fusion - but my dad would have had to get a third biopsy to confirm that and get the prescription. Why didn't they get enough material the first or second time? Nobody could say. Every step of the treatment process was done piecemeal and ultimately my dad was in no condition to get yet another biopsy. I wish there was some process by which he could've just gotten the damn pills in the off chance there was a response.

I'm still not getting it. What mechanism allows for knowledge of the effect before the cause objectively happens? For the third party to observe the effect, the cause had to have happened from Earth's perspective. The fact that the light hasn't reached the third party yet seems immaterial. I'm not trying to play gotcha, seriously don't get it.

"As you can see, the light from the phone call reception arrives well before the light from the placing of the phone call. Again: causality is violated."

It's still only speaking about the perspective of the ship, and it seeing effect before cause.

Then it doesn't violate any fundamental laws of existence, does it? We're just talking about receiving delayed images of events. The ship isn't engaging in backwards time travel by contacting Earth after seeing its call being received, because Earth knows it already placed the call. No information from the future is being conveyed to Earth, and the third party isn't actually able to affect the "cause" after seeing the "effect", because the cause is over and done with.

>What does the ship see? They see the phone call received on Proxima Centauri. Then they see the phone call placed from Earth. Effect precedes cause: causality is violated. In fact, if the ship had a FTL phone set up in the right way, they could call Earth before Earth placed the call. They could even tell Earth "hey, don't make that call to Proxima Centauri we just saw you make." Then what?

I don't understand the problem here. The ship couldn't call Earth before Earth placed the call. It would see the call being received before Earth placing the call, but if it then called up Earth on their FTL phone and said "hey, don't make that call to Proxima Centauri we just saw you make," wouldn't Earth just reply "Uh, we already made the call, you seeing old light doesn't mean these events didn't already happen." Why does it matter what the third observer sees? Cause and effect aren't violated just because it can appear that way.

How does FTL violate causality? I've tried reading on it before but didn't understand it with my casual understanding of physics.

This is all just supposed to be self-evident? What even are you talking about? Be specific.

If someone becomes a NAZI after being tossed in jail for no good reason, well hey, fuck em'.

How about we stop justifying hurting people because of their (in this case retroactive) violations of social/political norms and worry more about if our society itself is tolerable and is, in fact, sometimes perfectly deserving of extreme reactions.

I'm not interested in arguing over how best to increase the GDP and labeling all regulations subsidies, or having the meta-debate over how everything is technically a subsidy. I'm talking about animal rights, human happiness, and how those things have very recently been assaulted by finance in an unprecedented way.

There are more important things in the world to think about than how to most efficiently stuff people full of mass quantities of cheap processed meat from suffering animals.

Nothing is inevitable. We're not slaves to the market. If the market means small farmers can never be as efficient as factory farms and finance, and may not have any place in the economy at all without contracting out all aspects of their farms and losing their standards of living - then F the market.

Sometimes we need to step back from these abstract principles and ask ourselves if we want to live in that kind of world. I'd rather have a country where normal people can farm, animals can live good lives, and we have values other than prostrating ourselves before the altar of GDP.

It's a sin for good reason, and the secular case against usury is just as strong. It's among the worst manifestations of rent-seeking, economically worthless behavior for anyone but the usurer.

This kind of lending is economic slavery. Why should a credit card company get a 15-30% return on their investment each year? How about 400%? You can use whatever clinical microeconomic language you want about risk and investment principles and rational actors and etc etc, but people now depend on credit for their basic needs. Then lenders can petition the government to garnish borrower's wages and gain eternal, guaranteed payment often on just interest. The borrower works and pays forever without even reducing the principal, and butts sit in offices redistributing wealth to themselves without adding any value to society.

It should be illegal to charge that kind of interest "investing" in the basic needs of people. The absurd prices of basic necessities in America now demand mortgages, car loans, student loans, medical debt, and credit card debt just to squeak by as a normal middle class person. Debt wasn't the solution to the price problem, but rather the cause.

No. Whatever effect the 737 MAX grounding has had on Boeing's profits pales in comparison to the benefit gained by rushing the plane out the door to get in front of Airbus and thus making billions in sales contracts. There has been virtually no effect on Boeing's stock price, and the plane will probably be back in service within the year.

All in all, putting lives at risk was a good move for Boeing, and they'll surely do it again.

George Soros should not be in control of anything.

>When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.

Maybe you already know this, but non-aphantastic (heh) just see black too. When we visualize something, it's a very different experience from seeing anything at all. It's more the knowledge of "if I could see this thing, this is how it would look".

I'd be very interested in knowing what really happens in our brains. It feels like stringing together a bunch of information and assembling a spectral "print preview" that you can't really see.

Who do you work for?

One startup I interviewed at, as an experienced developer, told me (paraphrasing here) "you'll be paid a salary lower than what you probably expect, and your first few months you'll need to work overtime to get used to our trendy tech stack, we don't offer health insurance but we do offer...not quite shares, but, sort of ownership interests. You could become a millionaire!"

Yeah no thanks.

The continuously-activating MCAS is such a monumentally stupid and dangerous system that I think you'd be a fool to trust any Boeing-engineered aircraft. I'll be avoiding them for the next few decades.