krtong's comments

he's just pointing out that nobody writes the flu as the cause of death on a death certificate. The CDC simply releases estimates, while we've been tracking the severity of COVID-19 deaths by asking clinicians to write the cause of death as COVID-19 on the death certificate if they tested positive.

Patient has flu and dies of a stroke? Flu can increase the chance of stroke by 50% but the cause of death was the stroke, not the flu. Same thing happens to covid-19? They died of covid-19.

The point is that the data collection methods are so different there's no possible way you can really look at the numbers and tell if one kills more than the other.

I wouldnt offer air bnb a billion for 10%. I dont think they can pay it back. I hope they can't pay it back. Dublin Ireland saw 67% more housing available overnight because air bnb home owners needed to offer their homes to long term stayers since the travel ban. They're a nuisance.

It's the closest to printing money as the real world gets. "Hey here's an insane amount of money at 0% interest rate so you could literally invest in ANYTHING and make free money. Go ham."

Lets remember what causes slowdowns in productivity, panics, the great depression, the recession etc: people being slammed with too high interest rates for what's feasible for them to repay when times are tough. If the fed offered low interest rates directly it would be a different world. Remember also, the world is an auction house, so when people get these kinds of perks and you don't, your money doesnt go as far.

i disagree on pretty much every underlying supposition here: the tax evasion whataboutism, “why facebook when everybody evades taxes?” US allowing these other companies to offshore profits, as if the IRS has the ability to, at any point, ask for that money back; The government having any use for the facebook; facebook being capable of coercion/ memes and advertising having any effect on the way people vote.

We know people read what they want into political media. the content may affect your experience on facebook but Facebook has not been proven to have any effect on the ballots.

Facebook was probably caught in the act. IRS probably found some legal loophole to actually sue facebook and has not yet found one for google, etc. whats more important to the irs? Getting facebook to change its content policies which would have zero effect on this upcoming election given everyone already knows how theyre going to vote, or 9 billion dollars?

wasn’t the original intent of copyright law to protect the intellectual property of authors, presumably like gulliver’s travels?

Also i love the idea of the site, and the idea of fan fiction being an opportunity teach the youths to write stories (to a degree, for instance i also worry too many professional instagram photographers can make you feel like you cant shoot photography) Im honestly waiting for a “github” for stories, movies, graphic novels, etc. Perhaps one already exists, perhaps someone’s using github as such.

i havent come to a personal conclusion on if its even a feat of engineering. Im impressed by amazon’s handling of logistics, and I do think consumer data helps Amazon know when and where products are most likely to sell, perhaps even upsell customers or get customers to agree to a steeper markup, but beyond that, i don’t think actual predictive models of consumer behavior has really been achieved here. Ive never gotten a sense that amazon intuits my consumer habits and ive made a lot of purchases over the years. i dont think amazon has made a dime on storing timestamps for when i turned a page on a kindle or learned anything from the music i listened to. ive never bought a single recommended product. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being Delos incorporated and perfectly modeling user behavior—-accurately predicting how i’ll react before I even see the products they place in front of me—and 1 being Wall-E making blocks of trash, id say this data collection is a 2.5 at best.

I enjoyed this post on reddit explaining why China has such a large population [1]:

"You might be familiar with how the Nile River in Egypt works from school. If you aren't - for 9 months out of the year the Nile has a moderate flow rate that is sufficient to support human settlement and agriculture. For the remaining 3 months the Nile's flow rate increases dramatically and it floods a huge area around its river banks.

That flooding might sound bad but its not. Using soil for agricultural purposes will deplete it's minerals within about 100 years. That's a long time compared to a human life, but not compared to a civilization. When the soil runs out of minerals you can't grow anything in it anymore, and it turns out that this is the limiting factor for most civilizations. IE, a civilization will begin intensively farming its soil, deplete the soil, then starve to death.

In the modern world we're able to replenish the soil's minerals with fertilizer. They were sort of able to do this in the ancient world as well, but this involved transporting huge amounts of animal manure which is difficult to do and, in practice, if an ancient civilization had to manually fertilize the soil it would result in very low agricultural yields.

This is what makes the Nile's floods so good for the development of civilization - every time the Nile would flood it deposits a huge amount of new soil in the areas that got flooded. The source of that new soil was hills and mountains in Central Africa, so it was filled with minerals. Or to put it another way - every year the Nile naturally dumped a huge amount of fertilizer on Egypt.

This natural fertilizing allowed Egypt to be by far the most productive agricultural region West of India for thousands of years - everyone from the Pharaohs to Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire fed themselves using the food that the Nile was able to grow.

How does this relate to China? The Yellow River in China is the same type of river as the Nile. It spends most of the year with a moderate flow rate, then has massive floods for a few months that deposit a bunch of new soil along its banks.

Where the Yellow River is different from the Nile is in its size. The Nile is a single, small river with practically no tributaries or lakes. The Nile's floods only cover a small geographic area located immediately adjacent to it.

The Yellow River, on the other hand, is a massive system with hundreds of tributaries and lakes. When it floods, it covers almost the entirety of South East China - which is an area thousands of times the size of that covered by the Nile.

The Yellow River basin has been among for the most productive agricultural areas on Earth for much of human history. Because the only limiting factor to population size is a region's ability to produce food, this also means that the Yellow River Basin (and by extension, China) has managed to maintain a huge population for the entirety of human history."

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/exghji/e...

If you're referring to social media platforms when you say "treat them like they're cigarettes" just remember you're smoking a pack right now.

Just remember that Herbert Hoover was a terrible test taker. His colleagues vouched for his brilliance because they read his previous work and thought he was a genius. It turned out he was the type to spend a lot of time revising his answers until they were perfect, so under any sort of timed test he would fail, including his entrance exam into Stanford.

I'm only sharing that factoid because I find it interesting. Maybe Herbert was a terrible engineer by today's standards. He almost certainly wouldn't be president today for completely different reasons, but would he be have been accepted into Stanford? Would he even make it as an engineer? I don't know--certainly not if we put as much weight as we do on tests.

If you could create instructions efficient enough for a computer to drive a car, it always seemed like you just created the best instructions for a human to drive a car too, and a human who had similar instructions would always be a better driver of the two. "Pay attention to this, prioritize these things, brake when this occurs, turn when this occurs, safest speed is this given these parameters." and so on. You would think silicon valley would be obsessed with learning how to drive really well given the amount of time so many engineers have spent on automating it. We should have our own F1/WRC team by now sponsored by these companies.

Someone needs to come up with a single-player social media website that helps people be alone. At the very least it would be a hilarious social commentary.

In this imperialistic "horse race" nations improve the wellbeing of humanity because nations are incentivised to take care of its citizenry since the citizenry is their military. Back in the day either you were either a soldier, or you paid your way out of service by funding the army and paying the salaries of the rest of the soldiers.

Things in the last 200 years have changed greatly and I don't know if the ideology holds up anymore. The American Civil War, WWI and WWII showed that nation populations are greater than any transportation system can physically move to the battlefield, so improving the wellbeing of humans has taken a backseat to improving technology since the bottleneck of war isn't how many soldiers you have, it's how fast you can move and how fast you can kill off the other side.

The other bottleneck during the last couple major wars (aside from transportation) was the supply of raw materials. If America wasn't mineral rich and shipping ammunition to both sides during WWI the war would've ended a lot sooner. Today I wonder what war would be like because there's a near infinite supply of people, and raw materials.

Also there's a seemingly infinite supply of money currently in circulation. Everything seems to be getting bought and sold as global investors frantically try to find enough things to invest in. It's an absurd world we live in and I agree that the meaning of it all has completely broken down.

People often use "capitalism" or "free market" interchangeably with "laissez faire economics." What you're referring to is laissez faire, not "the free market." Laissez faire occurs in a capitalistic society but it's a subset of capitalism. Really it's an ideology more than anything, usually called names like "libertarianism." It also sort of defeats the point of the economic growth.

Economic growth is for national security, specifically to fund and produce supplies for our armies. This is why we talk about economies in the context of nations. This is why nations frequently subsidize businesses or full-industries. This is why Alexander Hamilton sent spies to Britain to steal factory blueprints, or why Xi Jinping subsidizes Huawei, or why the PRC exists at all.

America wrote the playbook that china's following. That's why you can trust what America says about China. That's why it's good if america does something but bad if another country does it. Nations are all just horses in the same race. You're supposed to pick one.

It isn't intuitive to anyone, given that it's not the battery at all. It's a software update slowing down the phones. People replace a battery when the battery doesn't last. But Apple realizes if people replaced their battery then they would likely wait another iteration to replace their phones because they've sunk more cost into their existing phone, so they've extended the life of the battery by sacrificing performance. This way, people don't replace their batteries, and their phone is so much slower than the new phone that they're even more likely to buy a new one.

Not only that but this is the second time Apple's being sued since they did the same thing to the 4 and 5. And the thing is, they pushed the update when they released the 6. I'm surprised (but not really) that they're still pulling this crap.

this seems like they were fixing a bug. The previous owner had autodrive enabled but never actually paid for it. Sounds like a small claims issue to determine how much money the dealer is owed for buying a car that doesnt have everything it was supposed to come with.

Oh this makes me happy. Im stoked with the 4k results. The gravel under the tracks looks so good. I feel like it's a definite improvement and I know it's only going to get better.

but Just remember, the bargaining power of any union is a non compete agreement. Corporations are unions for the modern day mercantile class.

You can go further back to the founding of the nation for why this is. It didn't start with the GOP. Things that would be nationalized in other countries like the railroads have always been private in america. Even when Alexander Hamilton and George Washington had taxpayers of New Jersey pay for the country's first manufactories in Paterson, they were all private industries. Abraham Lincoln privatized all the railroads and telegraph lines after the civil war. (We had nationalized them for the war effort, so taxpayers paid for thousands of miles of railroad that was handed off to railroad companies.) You can even go further back, before the united states was even a thing and look at mercantilism, where merchants/private industry ran the country, but it was understood that they were subservient to the nation, economic growth's sole purpose was for national defense, and you took care of your citizenry because they were your troops. Thanks to the civil war, the 2nd industrial revolution, the gilded age, globalism, america has taken more and more turns towards 'every man for themself' and not giving a shit about the country, so obviously well-intentioned privatization of public utilities makes less and less sense.