Hacker News Reader

HarryHirschon Bird flu in Texas: many human cases, no certainty about human to human spread?

Last summer, Governor Pritzker, who is angling for the presidency, pulled back on a health insurance program for illegal immigrants (https://news.wttw.com/2023/06/20/illinois-scaling-back-healt...) and became a crusader for abortion. That is now backfiring, such moves do not engender trust with the near-slaves working in agriculture for the nation's food supply. You think someone who can't take off time when sick and doesn't have the money for the doctor will cooperate?

HarryHirschon Bird flu in Texas: many human cases, no certainty about human to human spread?

to monitor the health of workers on affected farms

Are they really? There's economic incentives against it - the farm owners won't want to know that their herd has bird flu, and the farmworkers, a good chunk of whom are illegal, don't want to know either. And now suddenly, the same government that studiously looked aside wants to count what doesn't want to be counted?

HarryHirschon He Lost $36B in a Week. Now Bill Hwang Is Fighting to Avoid Prison

That's because the "prosperity gospel" faction (also called "pray and display" and "gab and grab") is so very open about money and the good life, it's in fact their core part of religious practice.

When a regular person says "heaven has blessed me with this and that", that's making a statement of fact, that person says he has this and that and he credits the deity, nothing more. But when a prosperity gospel guy says such, that person is engaging in theurgy. He believes that the deity blessed him in such and such a manner and by publicising the fact the deity must necessarily bless him with much much more money.

Positive thinking and "law of attraction" is less overtly Christian but made from the same cloth and just as detestable.

If you find that theology distasteful, childish or blasphemous you are not alone.

HarryHirschon Transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough

I understand that the deal is that "golden rice" is a low-maintenance GMO crop whose purpose is to get a foot in the door for other GMO crops, with all the issues that you mentioned.

HarryHirschon IceCube observes seven potential tau neutrinos

Ice-τ instead of Ice Cube? Understandable, that.

HarryHirschon Tesla recalls all cybertrucks for faulty accelerator pedals

An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical article is "no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like safety culture.

HarryHirschon Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case

His backers are even luckier. In a functioning country there would be a public inquiry and adequate sentences handed out.

HarryHirschon March job growth zoomed: payrolls jumped by 303,000, unemployment drops to 3.8%

Now let's ask: do these jobs pay, and what is the cost of housing, energy and healthcare doing? Remember: anyone who drives an hour a month for Lyft does not count as unemployed!

HarryHirschon We need a permanent solution for universal broadband access

How? Those of us that still remember the days of monopoly telephone, it was glorious. High uptime targets, excellent quality of service, and low cost for new installation because it was the monopolist. Nowadays, try getting Comcast 100 meters outside city limits.

HarryHirschon Deaths at a California skydiving center, but the jumps go on

with good gear and training, it "appears" you can control for a lot of risks

I can't find the statistics right now but seem to remember that the main source of fatalities is young men (< 25 years) on crotch rockets and alcohol. If you ride a sensible bike and stay sober, motorcyclists are only 3 times as likely to die as automobile drivers.

HarryHirschon 'HR is not your friend': why frustrated workers are hiring reps of their own

HR are on your side when your interest and theirs are congruent and when they recognize that. You'd think that it would be in the company's best interest to avert lawsuits, but that doesn't mean that they act accordingly. My former employer paid ten millions in settlements in the last two years, several lawsuits are being litigated now, and even more suits are coming down the pike.

HarryHirschon Is Economic Deprivation the Real Cause of the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis?

The housing markets in Germany and Spain are awful, at least in the cities where the jobs are. And in Spain there's the youth unemployment crisis as well.

HarryHirschon Raising the minimum wage? Study using US tax data finds more gain than pain

Just look at Walmart. They don't offer a living wage, so they fix their employees up with every last social program the locality offers. And as a citizen you don't even get to opt out of that. Ordinarily, when you disagree with any business, the first step would be to boycott it, but you can't, you cannot opt out of your taxes going to food stamps and housing subsidies for those working at Walmart under the living-wage threshold.

Especially insidious: work requirement for people on food stamps.

HarryHirschon Raising the minimum wage? Study using US tax data finds more gain than pain

The bottomline is to ask: After a year, do these workers have more disposable income, or does - for example - local housing cost raise and eat up the higher wages?

What if that was the point of this study - be a submarine for increasing the minimum wage? If has been said that Silicon Valley is a conduit to move VC money to landowners, and here is just more of it.

HarryHirschon Nobody Told EV Owners How Quickly They Burn Through Tires

Accidents per driver is the only metric that matters, because the one tells you how risky a certain class of drivers is. Accidents per passenger mile is not even meaningful, because you do not decrease the risk by by making more miles.

HarryHirschon Cutting a 700 carat rare valuable gemstone [video]

It is, oil mist causes causes emphysema when you breathe it in. I have no tolerance for people operating rotary vane pumps without a coalescing filter.

HarryHirschon Cutting a 700 carat rare valuable gemstone [video]

The guy puts methyl salicylate on the stone with his bare hands. Is he not afraid of coagulation disorder - the stuff is absorbed through the skin!

HarryHirschon Nobody Told EV Owners How Quickly They Burn Through Tires

Too much acceleration and far too high a mass, as confirmed by the accident statistics. Tesla routinely leads the pack.

HarryHirschon Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who wrote the book on how to hunt hackers (2019)

nobody would want to shop online rather than go to a mall

But we do have Best Buy, where you can inspect the product before you buy it. And the wife complains about Walmart grocery shopping, where the Walmart employee picked bad vegetables or made really silly substitutions.

HarryHirschon Elon Musk's Starlink Terminals Are Falling into the Wrong Hands

Doesn't the Starlink satellite have to know the position of the receiver, and isn't a Starlink cell some 25 km in radius? The whole thing doesn't really make sense, anti-American groups making use of an American ISP!

HarryHirschon Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses

there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water

You put in sheet piling 50 meters upstream, and you fill the box with rocks. That's state of the art practice, nowadays, but that bridge was 50 years old.

HarryHirschon Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses

German Wikipedia has an article on ship deflectors. What is says there is that ship collisions were viewed an an inevitable hazard until the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa. That was 45 years ago.

HarryHirschon When did dogs become our best friends?

When you are eating a shit sandwich already because that's all there is it doesn't matter if there's dogshit or horseshit on it.

HarryHirschon Allegations of criminality by Boeing in deceased whistleblower complaint

A former abusive supervisor insisted on MS Teams instead of email because she thought Teams was immune to discovery. That is common conduct.

HarryHirschon Indonesia's e-bike shops are building their own batteries

How about glueing? After all, two parts are held together by application of a different substance.

HarryHirschon America's economy has escaped a hard landing

It's lack of industrial policy, really, the fact that these people did good science until outsourcing started proves it. It's not cases of "got useless PhD at university no one ever heard of".

HarryHirschon America's economy has escaped a hard landing

A strong economy tends to cause higher housing prices

A look at the data will tell you that housing construction does not meet demand since in the mid-1980's (!): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST. It's now obvious to anyone that the policy failure has caught up with the nation.

The problem is seriously compounded by the depopulation of rural areas and the fact that current new construction is not entry-level housing and never will be. You can't subdivide an exurban mansion into four apartments.

HarryHirschon America's economy has escaped a hard landing

Dude is saying that someone who is works for 1h in a week is not included in the U-3 statistics.

The wife is reviewing job applications for a teaching position at her institution. There are people applying who did decent work in the past and are now writing assignments for study.com. That's some serious underemployment visible there.

HarryHirschon America's economy has escaped a hard landing

If the economy is that strong, why are housing prices outrageously high on either coast, where the jobs are? To paraphrase Jesus, it's not about Man serving the Economy, it's about the Economy serving Man.

HarryHirschon Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

This is especially painful for college grads, who don’t have specific experience to fall back on.

There is no training or university pipeline any longer?