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ABCLAW

3,282 karma · joined July 28, 2016

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ABCLAW··on Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief
Not the poster you're replying to, but despite the fact that I think you're right, the mistake you've highlighted on is pretty reasonable given that there's people from many countries here and plenty of people default to C vs. F. No need to go on the attack to make a helpful correction. :)

I'll be over here cooking an egg on the sidewalk if you need me.

ABCLAW··on Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it
>But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?

All of the above.

Don't take this as a slam, but given your responses in this thread, it's probably a good idea to get a primer about how anticompetitive practices work.

ABCLAW··on Meta forced to reveal anonymous Facebook user's identity
>Is the Dutch legal system inviting themselves to become a party to every single he said/she said drama on Facebook?

Legal action is very expensive. While vexatious litigants exist, the total volume of legal proceedings being commenced is not particularly large.

ABCLAW··on Mental Liquidity
There's a common issue in philosophy and epistemology over how we come to know things. We wanted to know what 'knowledge' was, and settled upon the concept of a 'justified true belief' for a fairly long period of time.

However, one day, a philosopher found a situation in which a justified true belief was incorrect. This is the Gettier problem.

What you describe is something akin to a network of baysian conditionals attached to certain proposition, which upon confrontation with new information update their relative weights. We know with certainty that this process has significant benefits in general (it's certainly better than most systems not internalizing new information), but can and does create false reasoning.

In short, it's good but not sufficient to create knowledge. The problem of individuals creating ideological filter bubbles around themselves is very related to the idea that their evidentiary priors become more and more rigid as they note confirmatory evidence over time that justifies their views over time. The issue isn't that they stop intaking new information, but that their priors and the new information are interpreted based upon that belief network.

Thankfully, as a super-organism, we have a great solution for that mental ossification. We die. New people who have less evidentiary accumulation can address the issue with new priors and often that's all that's needed for huge breakthroughs.

ABCLAW··on Clinical trial of mRNA universal influenza vaccine candidate begins
>But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response

Not all mutations are equal; the flu has antigenic factors that rapidly change in response to evolutionary pressure that don't significantly affect the fitness of the virus. If you're able to target another element of the virus that is conserved, or target a large segment of the possible antigenic conformations in a single vaccine, you'd force immune evasion mutations to significantly lower the virus's fitness, which is a very big deal.

ABCLAW··on People with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system
>Ambulance shows, guy says "No!" and so everyone says "Oh, this person is doing just fine, leave them alone."

No, no one says 'this person is doing fine'. It's 'we're medical staff and we can't arrest people - they are clearly withholding consent, we can't do anything else'.

I've stayed with distressed homeless people trying to hurt themselves while social worker teams, cops and medical staff came to the scene; if the homeless individual doesn't want help and is not an active danger to others there's very very little that can be done to forcibly detain them.

> If the people advocating for the homeless and mentally ill have a better solution than leaving them on the streets to rot, then I would like ot hear it.

Fund shelters and support groups well enough that trying to get off the streets and get help doesn't require that you bunk next to someone who has a shiv and is experiencing a massive heroin withdrawl event while you try to sleep. There's a reason homeless people dodge a lot of so called 'help'. It's because the help is often worse than the alternative.

ABCLAW··on Google Play Developer Antitrust Litigation
>Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away".

Because an admission could be used against you in future litigation, thus defeating the purpose of settling in the first place. Settlement functions as a method of allowing litigants to liquidate their conflicts without wasting court resources and expending exorbitant amounts of money going through all steps of the court mandated conflict resolution procedure.

Even if you don't agree that you are at fault, there is some chance that a judge may not agree with you. If you think that chance is 10%, and the suit is worth 100M + you expect to pay 20M in fees, wouldn't it make sense for you to settle for 10M? Regardless of how the case turns out, you're 10M ahead of your anticipated fee spend and 20M ahead of your risk adjusted expected result, and the other side ends up with the risk adjusted value of their claim.

ABCLAW··on Ask HN: Disabled and out of work for years, but need some side income
>It's not a problem with the "system" that mathematicians know more about math than the general public

One of the historical high watermarks in legal history is the existence of the twelve tables, a highly condensed, shortened version of roman law which was prominently displayed in public market places and other easily accessible fora - specifically to allow non-patricians to understand and have access to the law.

Other moments in legal history have ruling classes enacting legislation in languages which the common-folk don't even speak.

We exist along a spectrum between 'everyone knows and understands' to 'nearly no one knows and understands', but don't take the difficulty of fixing the issue with the idea that it isn't a problem in the first place. It is a problem, and it's a large one.

ABCLAW··on Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus
I'm not going to discuss any of the tie-ins with capitalism, because frankly I don't care to, but I'm going to point out that as a historical note this is not an accurate representation of legal history. In fact it largely ignores it.

Our current system of real property ownership is a result of adopting feudal legal structures to the growing need of society to build durable capital investments on land during the advent of industrialization. The 'fee' in fee simple is etyomologically derived from 'fief', a system in which land titles were granted to people in exchange for fealty and servility.

Agrarian societies had significantly different needs and organized their affairs differently and they didn't starve during the winters. Except for those that did, like the settlers in iceland, who died from potentially too many property rights as landholdings became concentrated in the hands of a few small families which left their society brittle enough to be wiped out by inuit raids.

Anyways, the naturalistic fallacy isn't good support for current property rights, which are about as artificial as any law gets.

ABCLAW··on Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus
Both neoliberal and classical definitions of capital make it nearly tautologically required as an input for production. 'Wealth' and 'Capital' aren't the same thing.
ABCLAW··on Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus
>People will say capital

Because the answer is capital.

ABCLAW··on EPA proposes to strengthen air quality standards
>I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life.

Well, there's clearly a spectrum between 'the government controls everything' and 'it's legal to release chlorine gas into the vents of buildings'.

The bigger question should be whether or not it's a good idea for government to intervene in this issue with some specific policy rather than litigating whether or not government should be able to exercise any power at all. Is the concept of air quality regulation inherently dystopic?

ABCLAW··on ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers
I think the only way you can make this argument is to have a completely value agnostic perspective and believe that any individual value curve is good. Is Meth good because people clearly value it enough to destroy their lives to get more? No. It isn't - we know individual value assessment isn't always right.

People genuinely enjoy those foods because they're closer to their bliss point than natural analogues. Increasing salt, fat and sugar content of processed foods doesn't mean they're better for consumers. They just mean they're more addictive. People consume more of them and are more likely to purchase them in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

We have no issues identifying that restrictions on tobacco are acceptable from a public health standpoint - the same chemical reward hijacking is being done with food.

ABCLAW··on “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”
>Welcome to reality. You'll laugh now, but if you want to hold something of lasting value, that's kinda how it works.

Yeah, when I own a bunch of equity, real estate and other intangible rights, I do my best to fit them all into my back pocket too.

Sure sucks trying to fit a few hundred acres of well placed development ready subdivisions in my jeans, though.

ABCLAW··on Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]
>I imagine there’s reasonably priced financial products like business lines of credit

So much so that there's names for various ways of cutting up the receivables risk. For example:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/factor.asp

ABCLAW··on A new treatment for arthritis: Vagus-nerve stimulation
Lazy thinking. Governments that provide and purchase healthcare services are also in the business of funding research.

In what world do we not see an alignment of interests for studies from nutritionists and dieticians on this topic?

We have a LOT of studies on low fodmap diets and their health effects.

ABCLAW··on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
We don't. You're confusing what's being called absurd. The argument you presented or the comparison itself. One doesn't imply the other.

Anyways, this is an old thread so I'll drop off. Have a nice day.

ABCLAW··on The Twitter Files, Part Six
There's a bunch of these analytics platforms available. Government isn't the only one using them, and twitter isn't the only platform being used.

Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools.

Spreading the conversation elsewhere doesn't change the ability of these analytics platforms to cover them, although it does introduce more noise into the signal; the smaller the forum, the less an impact it has in the analytics rankings. If you slice up the pie into a ton of tiny chunks, the data received becomes less useful.

That said, some of the uses of these platforms are completely reasonable and very pro-social. We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.

ABCLAW··on The Twitter Files, Part Six
>but it does seem like a questionable use of the FBI to be doing content moderation for Twitter absent a criminal investigation.

Law enforcement, people in corporate risk, and business intelligence groups very often use social media to perform open source research. In fact, when they don't, people exclaim that the police are incompetent for not knowing the shooter said he was going to shoot a place up after a history of deranged posting and a call to violence on facebook or something.

There are platforms built on top of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Etc that will do automated sentiment analysis, key into keyword trends, etc. You can build reports, see how much impact or reach certain calls to violence have, etc. and then triage the threats that you think are credible vs. those that are full of shit.

There are people out there trying to recruit people to firebomb tax buildings. Telling Twitter to shadowban them before they develop networks and get off the platform is a lot more innocuous than raiding the guy's house to see if he has bombmaking equipment.

ABCLAW··on The Twitter Files, Part Six
Pop a few custodians worth of emails into Brainspace or any of the other tools to parse the information and you'll find that 300~ emails over 3 years is next to nothing (i'll double the number listed by Taibbi to be charitable). I'd expect that volume of contact in less than 2 days if there was a $100M construction project going on. And that's emails, not slack messages or other records. Just emails.

Additionally an email isn't an individual issue; an email thread almost always has multiple replies, forwards, etc. On the low end, if we assume only 4 emails per topic between the parties, that means the FBI only approached twitter 75ish times in three years, or 25 issues per year.

I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions.

If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel.

If the worst Taibbi can find is the FBI trying to take down a tweet trying to get republicans to vote on the wrong day, he's found fuck all.

ABCLAW··on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
>But the metaphor of "pants" is absurd.

Yes that's the point. It's a reductio ab absurdem. The pant metaphor is obviously absurd for the same reason that the initial position you posited is absurd. In order to salvage your initial position, you need to differentiate the logic or premises from the absurd argumentation.

Pants and Shirts aren't symbols of fear and control despite being mandated in most areas of public life, but shackles, prison garb and other elements of clothing certainly would be. Therefore there's an element other than being mandated that makes clothing a symbol of fear and control. This is what the pants metaphor shows.

>I won't be participating, because to me, the value of seeing human faces vastly exceeds the benefit of avoiding a cold. This is also reductive (not the personal choice aspect, but rather how it ties into the original discussion of masks as symbols of fear and control); would you agree with the faces over mask rule during a surgery with patients susceptible to infection? Would you consider hospital rules that OR staff wear masks during such surgeries to be authoritarian overreach?

I think if you're willing to admit that 1) there are public health concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) that there's a trade-off to be made, then "I won't be participating" is a bit too absolutist to flow from the remainder of your beliefs. Certainly you can try refining a condition like "masking in high density communal areas during respiratory disease seasons" to be more or less restrictive rather than ignoring the issue altogether.

If we can do that, we can have a more meaningful discussion about where masking could be appropriate, rather than discussing whether or not it should occur at all.

ABCLAW··on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
>It’s anti-social to not wear a mask when society has decided to do so.

Sure, because the efficacity of mask usage increases with adoption. The logic works in one direction, though, not both.

>I’m not going to go around wearing a mask all the time to avoid a couple of days of cold symptoms every other year.

This is the point I was referring to. Would you wear a mask if you had a cold and doing so could prevent other people from getting your infection? If other people wearing a mask while symptomatic could save you months of healthy time over the course of your life, would you reciprocate in turn? More importantly, if evidence was provided that the risks to mitigate were significantly worse than 'cold symptoms' would your calculus change?

ABCLAW··on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
In my area, cases are rising fairly rapidly and certain hospitals have begun to rescheduling electives on the basis that they're overstressed. This is concerning because winter is just getting started and transmission rates when people are indoors are higher.

That said, I think the seasonal wave we're anticipating is a product of when our winter hits and how hard our winter hits - other areas might have very different experiences overall.

ABCLAW··on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
While I understand the sentiment of saying that a purely individual perspective is egregious, selfish, myopic and inappropriate for a situation in which individual selfishness can cause extensive social harm, it's not a good look to tell people that you hope their loved ones die.

I don't hope their loved ones die, I hope they become better.

ABCLAW··on Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
>Covering your face, as a primate, is not a natural thing to do.

1) Neither is wearing pants or a shirt. 2) Something being 'natural' doesn't make it right.

>Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong.

It doesn't need to have zero cost in order to be the correct thing to do. The question is whether or not the trade-off is worthwhile. Let's saying masking always under all conditions is too much of an imposition, are there restrictions we can place that make the trade-off better?

For instance: Is masking in high density communal areas during respiratory disease seasons with an X drop in disease propagation worth not seeing people's faces in that setting for that time period.

To extrapolate this back to the pants/shirt distinction; human life would end in a generation if we weren't ever able to take off our pants and shirt as we would never have sex again, but the intolerability of that restriction doesn't make it socially accepted for me to rub my bare ass onto a bus seat.

We can't have a discussion about how best to adopt masks, pants, or shirts as a technology if the only way they'll be accepted is if they're always a pure benefit in any situation.

ABCLAW··on Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought
1) This is the technical answer: Cyanide binds fairly strongly to one of the molecular machines involved in cellular respiration, inactivating it.

The result of that inactivation is that your cell begins to have issues producing ATP, even when it has nutrients available. Without going too far into detail, ATP is essentially the cellular unit of energy that your cells run on. Without being able to make more, your cell will eventually run out of ATP and it will die. Enough cells die? You'll die.

2) The more important point here is that not only is your intuition uninformed, but you appear to be incredulous as well. Ask yourself why you react to unintuitive results in areas you're not familiar with in the way that you do.

ABCLAW··on Redfin cuts 13% of staff, shuts down home-flipping business
It's not a hypothesis. You don't need to believe it exists and it may be less common in your market. I know this is true firsthand as in the course of my work, I review the financial and legal side of these entities at times.
ABCLAW··on Redfin cuts 13% of staff, shuts down home-flipping business
The problem doesn't necessarily blow up immediately. If people's analysis of the EV of a particular deal is positive on the basis of the bubble continuing, some groups will find continued investment is within their risk tolerance and keep going.

However, if interest rates rise, the EV drops, and sentiment may shift which will substantially increase the risk that market appreciation strategy fails.

Eventually the music stops and enough investors stop pumping the asset class, it peaks, and the lack of retail ability to shoulder the debt-load results in collapse in pricing - some major US banks have indicated that mortgage originations are down 90% this year.

Interest rates are only part of a larger calculus. What ultimately blows the problem up is a shift in perception about real estate being a good investment vehicle for large sums of capital.

ABCLAW··on Redfin cuts 13% of staff, shuts down home-flipping business
There are plenty of REITs operating in my city that have substantial detached residential holdings.

The EV on renting and holding substantially improves if the housing market takes off like a rocket. It might not work in your market, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

ABCLAW··on One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants
>do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

The regulator doesn't pursue trademark infringement cases. It is upon the trademark holder to defend their mark via proceedings. So WingstopCo would bring an action against ThighstopCo. In this case, since both marks are held by the same entity, there's no enforcement possible unless the holding entity an exclusive license to one of the marks to another party.

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