PureParadigm

So its effect on the immune system lasts even after it's gone. So if it were to cause any problems (in the immune system, for example), those could also persist after the mRNA is gone. So how exactly is this line of reasoning reassuring?

> once its gone, it can no longer have any effect on you.

If this is true, then how does it provide protection against COVID19 for more than a few days?

Wikipedia [1] has an overview of mRNA vaccines, including a summary of some potential side-effects/risks. For more technical details, this review of mRNA vaccines [2] appears to be a decent place to start.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/

A coworker of mine would write all his bash scripts to echo out the commands it would run, and then to actually run it he would pipe it to bash. This way he could inspect the commands to make sure they were correct before running them.

Something like: ./dangerous-script.sh $args | bash

I think this is a good point. I'm not sure how to best encourage political distancing. Perhaps the most realistic way is to pitch it as a way to reduce stress/anger/etc. (which I think will be true), but this relies on a self-disciplined general public which is not exactly something I'd bet money on. So this means we would need a more structural change or tools people could use to help them disengage in a healthy way.

If it is really so difficult to sort out the misinformation, then the next best thing would be to make the feed/site as boring as possible. Of course Facebook will never do this and another site would just take its place if it did. But I think it's important to realize that there are other strategies besides sorting out all of the misinformation (which may truly be a difficult/impossible task).

It is clear that Facebook is either unwilling or unable to effectively address the spread of misinformation. In light of this, I'm increasingly of the opinion that if misinformation and conspiracy theories are like viruses, then we should be practicing "political distancing," if you will. This doesn't mean being politically ignorant, but rather engaging in the minimum amount of political content you need to and no more. This would slow the spread of misinformation, since it simply doesn't have as many people to "infect" as quickly. While this may appear to go against the democratic spirit of maximum political engagement, democracy has worked before Facebook (and would probably be a lot better with less use of it). I think people's "default" political beliefs are generally less insane than many of the conspiracy theories (and if your beliefs already are that crazy then going on Facebook will only make them worse), so reducing engagement with political content should be something positive. This isn't something the journalists will recommend since their careers depend on clicks, but I think it's in everyone's best interest for people to back off the scrolling through the feed all day and take a break.

It's a double standard in that web browsers are not considered responsible for the content they display while chat apps are considered responsible. These are two different standards being applied just because of a technicality about whose servers the data is hosted on (whether app owner = server owner). Would Apple be okay with allowing a third-party front-end to the Telegram servers? Safari can be that if you use the web app version of Telegram.

How about we consider any website accessible through Safari? Is Apple going to start blocking users from viewing those?

This is a complete double-standard. Telegram messages are user-generated content. Is Apple going to start blocking websites in the Safari app? I'm sure one could find a lot worse things than doxxing by using Safari.

I think the idea is that you can achieve the diversity goal while still hiring the most qualified people by broadening the recruiting pool. This way you're not discriminating based on race because you are still hiring the most qualified people. To do this, you might increase recruiting at other colleges that didn't have recruiting before (especially if those colleges have different demographics than the colleges you already recruit from), or similar measures.

I think censorship resistance should be handled at a different abstraction layer. IPFS can focus on peer-to-peer immutable file sharing and some other tool can tunnel your traffic to avoid censorship. You could run IPFS over a VPN or something like that.

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but at least in California this doesn't seem to be the case: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/voting-cal...

It says you should bring in your mail-in ballot to the polling place, and if you don't then you can cast a provisional ballot "which will be counted after your county elections official has confirmed you are registered to vote in that county and did not vote more than once in that election." Based on that wording it sounds like if you already submitted a vote-by-mail ballot, then you would have already voted and your provisional ballot won't be counted.

I think this can definitely save you time in some cases, but usually at the expense of other people. For example, if someone asks me for help on something because I'm more familiar with it, my spending five minutes to answer their question might save them an hour of troubleshooting. Here, the Napoleon technique would save me time but only by wasting the other person's time. Eventually this might come back to bite me, perhaps if that other person is now an hour behind on a task that helps me.

And from the perspective of someone asking for help, it can also be really frustrating to not get a response. Slow responses give the impression that the other person is not paying attention. Any sort of reply, even a quick "I'll follow-up by the end of the day" is much better than no response at all. This shows people that you're listening and that they can trust/count on you.

Who exactly is going to hold the USA responsible for any violation of that treaty? And if someone tries to, what's stopping the USA from ignoring them?

I had a similar experience as the author when trying to do a "digital detox." I removed apps from my phone, installed a launcher that forces you to type the app name you want to open, changed the screen to black and white, etc. Yet a new distraction always creeps in to fill the space.

The most useful thing I did was put all my electronic devices in a separate room when going to bed. Before, I would often stay up on my phone until I was seconds away from falling asleep. The first day trying to fall asleep without any distractions was scarily difficult. Just being alone with your own thoughts, worries, stress, etc. can be really uncomfortable. But after getting used to it, not only do I get better sleep, but I think I also have better self-control to resist distractions during the day.

So for anyone looking to reduce distractions, start by removing all distractions when going to sleep. The first few times trying to fall asleep without distractions will probably be harder than you think, but it gets easier and you'll be better for it in the end.

Grandparent might be referring to the fact that the founders' vision of limited government was of a government much smaller than what we have today with much less interference in people's lives. If they were alive today the founders would likely be shocked at just how much the (federal) government does and how much it impacts daily life. Since the government was expected to do much less than it does today, voting would have a much less significant impact on people.

Concrete examples that did not exist at founding include:

- social programs (welfare, social security, unemployment benefits)

- high levels of military spending/military industrial complex

- income tax

- many of the executive branch regulatory and other agencies

etc.

VPN (and tor) users are the ones you'd be most interested in as a government. So it doesn't matter how much of the general population uses your VPN as long as you convince the ones you're interested in to use one.

And for all of those not using a VPN, just ask the ISPs.

If I were a government trying to gather metadata about web usage, the first thing I'd do is set up or acquire my own VPN company (and make it look convincing, of course).

It's possible there are more than 300,000 cases, since not everyone with the virus gets tested, so you can't assume 40,000/300,000 is the true death rate. There are likely many with milder symptoms who do not get tested and recover without going to the hospital, so the true death rate is lower than the confirmed deaths/confirmed cases figure.

"Master," in many contexts, need not be associated with slavery. You can be a (grand)master at chess without having any slaves. You can have a master's degree without having any slaves. In the case of git, I don't think there is a clear connection to slavery either (the non-master branches are typically referred to as feature or development branches). So unless chess grandmasters and master's degrees are going to also change names, I don't see why git needs to.

That analogy is not the same at all, and is quite a leap. The difference lies in the double negative in the antifa situation, if you will. The parent was claiming that if you are against antifa ("anti-antifa" such as by calling them a terrorist organization), then you are pro-fascist. But the antifa label comes with a lot more baggage than simply being against fascism. They are known for their militant/violent tendencies, which many people may not support, and some may go as far as to call terroristic.

I'm not interested in debating whether or not antifa is a terrorist organization, and doing so is not necessary to support the point I am making. All I am saying is that some people may have a different understanding of antifa, and believe antifa is a terrorist organization not for its stance against fascism, but for its violent methods. These same people may be completely against fascism but oppose those labeled antifa for the baggage associated with such a label.

The root issue is the implication that being antifa is nothing more than being against fascism. If that were true, then I agree with you. But it's not. The antifa label has become associated with political violence (just read the Wikipedia article). To most people, it no longer means simply being against fascism, but also has associations to antifa's violent methods. Many of the debates about antifa, and I think also this one, stem from the fact that people have different understandings of what antifa actually means. I think it is deceptive to pretend that antifa means nothing more than being against fascism, in the current political context. Perhaps it meant that in the past, but that is not the common understanding anymore.

One of the original points I wanted to push back against is when the parent said that "your clear designation of [antifa] as an enemy is also clear signaling that you're in for fascism." In particular, I don't think that it is fair to say someone is "in for fascism" just because they call antifa their enemy, or even if they think antifa is a terrorist organization. You can think antifa is a terrorist organization but also be against fascism.

I wasn't talking about calling it a terrorist organization. I was responding to the parent:

> If the former, you also know that "antifa" is short for "antifascist" and your clear designation of that as an enemy is also clear signaling that you're in for fascism.

In particular, I'm responding to "designation of that as an enemy" which is not the same as calling it a terrorist organization. People who oppose fascism and violence may call antifa an enemy for the violence committed and espoused in antifa's name. If someone commits violence against me, or any other innocent people I call allies, then they are certainly my enemy, whether I agree with their ideology or not. You can agree with something in principle (be anti-fascist) but not support particular methods (violence).

Coinbase is profitable [1]. Potentially other exchanges are profitable. Mining is profitable for some, or they wouldn't be doing it.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/brian-armstrong-conf...

Criticising antifa does not imply support of fascism. Many of those proclaiming to be antifa have committed acts of violence, and there are still some people left in the country who believe in peaceful protest and find violence distasteful. You can be completely against fascism but disagree with the violent tendencies of many who associate themselves with the antifa label.

No, that evaluates to 730. It's the same as 365*2=730.

I've taken exams in college where the professors intentionally put more questions on the exam than you have time for. They say, "think of each question as an opportunity to increase your score" as opposed to caring about answering them all. The score is then standardized at the end, since most results are below 50% correct. It turns out exams like this usually give a very normally shaped distribution. More time is a massive advantage in these cases.

It looks like the strategy here is to use free Civ Vi to try to get you to install the Epic Games store. If you have Windows, this may be compelling, but it also comes without a lot of the extra content that you'll need to play with friends if they use the extra content.

Maybe something to do with the uncanny valley [1]? It's mostly real, but just fake enough to feel... off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

Right. I'm not arguing for or against voting by mail or absentee ballots. I'm only pointing out that these voting methods come with risks, and it's better to be aware of the risks when deciding whether we want mail/absentee voting. There very well may be situations where absentee/mail voting is the best option (and possibly during this pandemic), but it would be disingenuous to pretend that they don't carry any risks. Like all public policy decisions, this is a cost-benefit analysis, and an informed decision needs to be aware of both costs and benefits.