someguy321's comments

15 seconds isn't worth it.

>What I see is that if a difference is indeed found, there can only be two reasons for it: Racism or sexism.

This seems absurd to me. As an example, I figure that the reason that there are more male construction workers than female construction workers is not sexism- it's that men largely have more physical strength and a greater inclination or preference for highly physical and dangerous work than women.

Would you call this sexism? Why should it be the default assumption that men and women have equal preferences to self-select jobs exact equal proportion for each and every profession?

If outcomes between groups are different, investigation into underlying causes of differences in group outcomes is often useful- bigotry need not be a motivation.

If you notice your fan motor or cord getting hot you can reduce the pressure differential (and therefore torque/load on the motor) by allowing some airflow to get around the filter- i.e. push the filter a bit to the side or add a tiny gap between the filter and the fan by sticking in a little block of wood.

This will come at a cost of filtration effectiveness (less airflow going through the filter) but will save your fan in the long run. Make sure not to let your gap or hole get too big or your filter will stop flowing enough air to work.

I think PTFE pans are overheated more often than we expect.

I figure that my above comment is pithy more than it's snarky, especially considering that many repliers understood its intent accurately.

People disagree on where the blame lies regarding consumption vs production, and it's difficult to know what is posturing and what is not.

On the money.

I read Snow Crash about two years ago and the theme of virality increasing as dynamic systems get larger feels all too real right now.

I read that fellow's blog (marginalrevolution.com) and he goes out of the way to get the best authentic local food he can get, he's well read about the history of many different countries and the economic implications of the recent history (he's an academic economist). He often does a brief blog writeup about the particularly culturally unique bits of places after he visits. Part of his job as an academic/ popular econ culture writer is to understand cultures and economies around the world.

I don't mind if part of his motivation is to impress others, or if it's wasteful, etc. Why would his motivations have to be pure for it to be meaningful for him?

Value judgements exist in a separate domain than pure rationality.

I like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla ice cream, and you're not gonna convince me otherwise by debating the flavor with me. It entirely could be the case that my preference is from cultural conditioning, but it's not my concern.

If your friend has a mindset of "to each his own" there's no problem.

If you read more of Philip Greenspun's writings it's apparent that he likes to inject a bit of satire into them. Both self-deprecating and deprecating others. I figure that he hit it on the nose with that bit.

You have an explicit choice to either not invest or invest. If you spend all your money instead of investing it, you're still making somebody work for you- they're immediately being made (although I'd disagree with this portrayal that it's involuntary, you may not) to serve you a plate of lunch or manufacture a new car for you.

Your attitude seems to be financially masochistic to me and possibly a way to justify your own actions.

I am seeing a lot of resentment in this thread. My best guess is that some of it is deserved and some of it isn't.

Something that this thread reminded me of is the fact that several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems making it so that this choice is just going to cause more suffering. I wasn't too surprised to hear this from them, knowing their personalities.

When the millenial zeitgeist has drifted in a direction where this is a common opinion, I take it to indicate that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals, the values of a family are subservient to the values of globalism, and all is nihilistic considering that we have a poor shot at solving the worst of our problems(the Nash equilibrium doesn't seem to be working out for global warming).

This observation makes me turn back towards family values. They work better than nihilism for me.

Gas stations are a notoriously low-margin business. Realistically costs get passed on to the consumer.

You pay for that service whether you realize it or not.

I can try to provide a perspective.

From what moral authority do positive rights originate? (a right that requires someone to provide you with a good or service)

From what moral authority do negative rights originate? (a right that prevents somebody from interfering with you or harming you)

Over the course of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, negative rights have been developed successfully in legal systems around the world. We've seen demonstrable evidence that enforcing protections of negative rights results in a happier and more productive population.

Different countries have also, generally more recently, brought forth positive rights by various means- welfare programs, socialism, full communism, or otherwise.

People that tend to care more about negative rights than positive rights tend toward right-libertarianism. Positive rights, in a sense, require those who can provide to forfeit some of their freedom, in order to help those who require it. There is a non-zero risk that a well-meaning welfare or socialist policy fails in its mission despite good intentions. Many of the communist states with the most heartfelt populist movements have seen the deepest failures. So in the right-libertarian mindset, there is a risk of a two-fold (or perhaps threefold) failure:

-It promised to provide (positive rights) prosperity to all, and it didn't

-It had to trample on the negative rights of the wealthy to try to redistribute their wealth

-(more vague)It eroded many individuals' notion of self-determination in the process, and in doing so left them less likely to work towards their own values.

Separately, there's the important notion of what the "staying alive threshold" is. Almost nobody in G7 countries dies of hunger or thirst, and those who do were likely in a crisis not determined by lack of access. Statistically, life expectancy increases with income up to and past $100,000/yr. The spectrum in between is fraught.

I'm a mechanical engineer.

The version control software that we use (I'm most familiar with Windchill, and just a wee bit familiar with SolidWorks PDM) is dumb. It's a B2B market with fat margins that is ripe to be disrupted.

Typically in Windchill, a part has a part number, and can be checked out and checked in, iterated, and revised, in operations that are non-intuitive and difficult to reverse. If you ever wanted to build an assembly using older versions of current parts, the process to figure it out might take 100 clicks, or might not be possible depending on how your system administrator set things up.

Merging (in the style of git) is generally a completely foreign concept, and engineers generally avoid collaborating on a single part or assembly file for that reason. Dividing up the interior of a vehicle's engine bay, for example, is best done as separate assembly files that are only later brought together as a parent assembly. Communicating about the volumetric boundaries of these assemblies is complicated.

I'm often aware that I could be more productive and adaptable using a git repo (or similar) containing my parts, assemblies, and drawings than I currently am with Windchill's specialized system. Haven't ever seen it in the wild, though.

I kind of figure that a lot of people are trapped in a "local optimum." Their life is fairly comfortable, but not extremely satisfying, and any direction they push doesn't yield results in an easily accessible way.

I kind of figure that this is a result of the standard of living in developed countries having a high baseline level of easy comfort, and the fact that life is getting more and more complicated all the time. It's hard to justify striving really really hard toward a complex goal (that didn't even exist in its current incarnation 20 years ago) when the immediate rewards aren't satiating or apparent.

Talking about the specifics of the person the article is about is talking about the signal.

Creating an abstract notion of what he represents as a member of the billionaire class is talking about something entirely different, and something that is distracted by notions of class warfare, social justice, and a thousand other emotionalized predispositions. It's less accurate and less useful if you care about judging an individual as an individual.

I would like to specifically talk about Warren Buffett.

If we can determine whether we agree or disagree about whether Warren Buffett is more or less virtuous than the average billionaire, then we can have a productive conversation.

Thankfully, the government still exists and also works to solve problems in parallel with charities. I don't advocate that Buffett takes charge of the world. It's also nice that Buffett doesn't give all his money to one charity- he distributes it across multiple charities that (I assume) he deems as "effective enough to be worth taking a risk on," which is about as good of a guess as anybody has on anything. And even if his motives are more personal, the motivation of earning the autonomy to act for your own best interest is one of the primary motivations that causes people to do hard work that both earns money and (often, but not always, but I figure more often than not) makes the world a better place to live.

At a certain level, any decision made by any individual with autonomy is anti-democratic. The greater that person's autonomy, the larger the effects, and for billionaires those effects are large. They aren't always "better at picking" than the government, but having diversifying our methods of problem solving yields better results. The world would not get eradicated of polio as quickly if the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation didn't work on it. The Against Malaria Foundation does a more cost effective job of preventing malaria than just about any organization on the planet. Habitat for Humanity completes an amazing mission of building affordable housing, teaching skills to interested volunteers, and helping people invest in their community all at the same time.

If government is the only tool in the toolbox, you'll only hammer the nails that governments can hammer.