Reedx

Absolutely. It would be amazing to see political debates (and discourse generally) where they're able to steelman each other's position and interact in good faith. That would have a profound effect on our democracy.

Instead we get strawmen, soundbites and kayfabe. Somehow we've got to get away from this.

Nice! Very usable, no nonsense. I hope Google sends you to the top for related search results.

Basically everything is neatly divided between the two political tribes now. If one says they're for X, the other is automatically against X. It's become comically predictable.

The people endlessly fight amongst themselves as the rich get richer.

Divide and rule.

That mentality seems to mostly come from people who were born into wealth and had parents who gave them everything. They project that perspective onto the world. That was their reality after all, and probably their surrounding community.

They're too far removed from how that wealth was achieved and don't understand it. See also: clogs to clogs in three generations.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

That's something they've acknowledged too, and had planned on a "Bullshit of Bullshit" finale:

"We promised to do a Penn & Teller: Bullshit of Bullshit! show as our last show in the series, but we walked away for a better deal and didn’t know when we did our last show that it was our last show. We still have hopes of going back and fixing some stuff about climate change, weight loss, secondhand smoke, and other things..."

https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/guYlDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...

Overall though I think they had a pretty good track record and seem to be forthright about things they messed up.

Even if safety has that magnitude of penalty, it doesn't explain years of delays and 2500% over budget. It would've been factored into the original timeline and budget.

And surely after 80 years of improvements in technology, materials, process, etc we have the ability to build in less time AND have no deaths?

How much room for improvement did you net out at? I wonder if there's a point where it'd be significant enough to make inroads...

The recent rebuild of a section of the Bay Bridge took 11 years and went 2,500% over budget. Whereas the original entire bridge was built in 5 years, ahead of schedule and under budget.

And something I just came across: SF allegedly had 6 Salesforce subscriptions at $1M/YR, and not even using them[1].

Given stuff like that, I worry you're right, it may hardly matter how much better a construction company is.

1. https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/12734043395669934...

Interesting, that's quite a bit more bold than I thought. Thanks for the insight!

If terms of use and privacy policies were as readable as nutrition labels, that would be a huge win.

Anyone know if there are any existing examples along those lines?

Which is part of why it's not that uncommon to see people who bounce from job to job every year or two in the Bay Area. It rapidly boosts salary. I've also seen where people leave for a top paying company, which sends their compensation right to the moon, then come back after a short stint.

Netflix seems to be a rare example of a company that is proactive enough with pay raises to counter this (any Netflix folks here that can confirm/refute?). Not sure why more companies don't do that, at least when they're well capitalized.

Nuclear energy is far safer than gas, and about the same as wind/solar:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-r...

Good deal. The National Parks are truly priceless and one of the best investments the country has ever made.

That's an important thing to understand and really internalize.

What makes sense in a city context doesn't always make sense in a town context. And what makes sense in a town doesn't always make sense in a city. The difference is huge, to the point that the best approach can be the opposite.

I think this is at the crux of a lot of the country's polarization and inability to understand the other side.

I would say that social media generally is the biggest threat.

However, I find it hard to believe that ads are even remotely the real problem (though they're part of it). They're not nearly as effective at influencing people as friends/journalists/etc and the methods social media uses to reward and elevate angry, tribal content. An endless stream of confirmation bias and strawmen, mostly from other users. Ads are a small part of that river, more likely to be ignored/blocked and more likely to be understood as fiction vs other content. They do have an effect of course, but it seems to be greatly overstated.

Also remember the unprecedented $500M ad experiment Bloomberg ran to little effect. Would $50B even have done the trick? I would bet not.

It describes a fallacy and have no idea who coined it. First learned of it on HN, actually.

You don't know who coined "coined", but they may well have been a racist. Are you going to stop using it if so? Does that mean it's no longer useful for communication? Are you going to investigate every word on the chance it might've been and strike those from the lexicon?

Casting those who question dogma as the other (conservative or "alt-right", commonly) is an effective silencing and compliance technique. "You're not one of us if you don't stay in lockstep" has a real chilling effect and is doing serious damage to the left. Obama warned about this too, but unfortunately wasn't well heeded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

It's also intellectually dishonest. Most (all?) of the cited authors are liberals. James Lindsay, liberal professor. John McWhorter, liberal professor. I'm pretty sure Jon Haidt and Paul G are liberal-minded. For random commenters on HN, you don't know what their leaning is nor does it automatically mean disqualification.

And it's worth noting that John McWhorter specializes in linguistics and has written books on language and race relations. He noticed the religious aspect of this years ago. Here he is on CNN back in 2015 making the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGJbrLs_8_0

Your skepticism is well warranted. Unfalsifiable theory, dogma you can't question, purity tests, good vs evil, original sin, heresy, excommunication, self-flagellation and so on... It's a religion and Kafkatrap, but not yet widely recognized as such.

Further explanation:

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/intellectual-fraud-robin-d...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonathan-haidt-on-the-cultural-...

https://unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politics-is-christianity-w...

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

That would make sense, those kind of optimizations are common in video games. Objects with physics go to sleep when they stop moving. Things off screen don't get rendered. Culling of objects based on distance or zoom level. Lots of tricks like those.

Maybe it's a simulation using a procedural algorithm that's still figuring out how to generate the conditions for intelligent life.

Or maybe the vastness of space and the physics that govern it (e.g., speed of light) ensures that life can never reach the end, or even see it. Kind of like how in Minecraft you can run in any direction and it'll just generate more land. Your run speed is no match for the Minecraft simulation.

It's still ultimately an unsatisfying idea though, since the next question is: What's outside the simulation? i.e., Where did God come from?

A rep from Backblaze gave an estimate on this. $250k/mo, not including probable volume discount.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...

Congrats Paras! 10 years is no small feat. Thanks for sharing, and hope to see this again in another decade!

Shame mobs, bending the knee... it's like an episode of Game of Thrones.

Social media and 24hr news

I think flat earth falls into that category. However... the problem is there are also things that seem clearly like bullshit that we later find out not to be.

Have you ever been completely convinced about something that turned out to be entirely wrong? Almost certainly, probably more than a few times. It happens to all of us. And sometimes this happens on a societal scale with things like science and civil rights. Ideas not accepted at the time, attempted silence, but fortunately resisted censorship until history was able to bore them out.

Never thought we'd see wide support for book restriction or censorship again. Are people not reading history or considering the second order effects? Heck, you don't even have to go back that far. Just look how badly "official sources" handled Covid-19.

For example, remember what the official word was, even despite being a self-contradiction: masks don't work, but save them for health workers. You may say that's a noble lie, but it destroys credibility and covers for the fact officials failed to prepare for the known threat of pandemics.

Which is in part why the political tribes have largely abandoned facts.

It's very difficult to actually get to ground truth, especially with the rate at which social media and the news cycle moves. It's a constant onslaught of (mis)information and we don't have reliable institutions to make sense of it. Worse, it turns out facts don't really matter as far as this game is concerned. Each side is able to live in their own reality, able to look at the same thing yet come to opposite conclusions. It's highly predictable. Whatever Team A is for, Team B easily finds a way to be against. And vice versa. Sometimes the teams even switch positions in unison, since consistency doesn't matter either.

It's full on Kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783

Yeah, if it really does deliver ~25ms latency and up to 1GBPS, work from anywhere becomes much more literal. Currently a lot of remote work and things like multiplayer games are limited to areas with reliable broadband.

But if you can get that anywhere... it'll be amazing and have a profound effect.

Also guns. Big jump in their stocks today.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gun-stocks-surge-past-broader-m...

A new normal has just been defined. Amazing to see.

"Thank you for flying with Falcon 9 today", as though it's an airplane.