apatters

I'm not a doctor but if you've ever had to deal with nerve pain or neurological conditions in general, there's a ton of stuff we don't know. Doctors will readily admit this. Not sure that the question of whether we've "tried hard" to understand it is a productive one but there's a ton of stuff where we have only a vague idea of what is going on, we prescribe drugs that sort of work but we don't know how they work, conditions that they can't even nail down a diagnosis for, etc. It's probably one of the least well understood areas of medicine.

This seems like a comment by someone who lacks a basic knowledge of Indian/Chinese relations but has an axe to grind against America. India and China are constantly saber rattling over turf wars and other geopolitical issues, and India withdrew from the recent Chinese-led RCEP free trade agreement over concerns that China would compromise their economic sovereignty.

India could undergo governmental reform and hire, say, German experts (or Indian experts!) to help revitalize their water infrastructure. Just illustrating a scenario where things change for the better and neither China nor America is involved whatsoever.

Sure, but for almost everyone, there's a dollar figure at which they're willing to stop having fun and start making money. Maybe that dollar figure is $1,000/hr for some open source maintainer out there (I bet it's much lower for most of them).

Why not put a line in the readme which says, if you want to commission a specific change, send me an email to discuss, my consulting rate starts at $XXX/hr. Or there's a $YYYY project minimum, or whatever is meaningful to the maintainer. If that feels too aggressive then leave the dollar figures out. Hard to imagine this running afoul of any reasonable community norms, especially for a project which already has the problem of too many people asking for things.

Maintainers can handle this problem however they like, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who's not getting paid, if they've never asked to be paid. I think they would be better off asking.

And again, if no one inquires - then nothing changes, it's still a 100% hobby project, with the bonus that the expectation to do other people's shit for free is gone.

Something I never understood is why don't more maintainers just post the rate at which they'd be willing to do the work other people want?

I suspect very few open source maintainers are doing so well financially that there's NO rate they would accept to perform other people's requests for their own project.

Whatever number it would take to motivate you to do the work, just put it out there. Aside from the fact that you might get paid, there's a hidden benefit: cheapskates who don't value your time as much as you do will quit asking for freebies.

I tried to go CLI only at one point but never quite got there.

It did, however, teach me a healthy appreciation for the benefits of pushing parts of my workflow into the terminal whenever possible. The terminal is distraction-free, highly scriptable, and your mode of interaction is always the same (type things!). Afterwards I ended up switching to Xubuntu + i3wm and never looked back. I've still got a copy of Windows 10 on a random machine and I interact with Macs occasionally, and it really seems like little of importance has been introduced to the graphical desktop paradigm since at least Windows 2000.

If you genuinely believe the mainstream US media doesn't lean left, have a look at the Media Bias Chart: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

The methodology is thorough and non-partisan (that's the point). Note that the triangle's apex is literally left of center.

Completely disagree. Even $100/mo invested into an index fund using a Roth IRA in your 20s will have a huge positive return on your quality of life later on. Millions of workers can afford this and don't do it because they haven't been taught/shown the value.

My public high school in the 90s had a mandatory personal finance class. This stuff existed.

It got cut from the curriculum at some point over the years along with art, music, civics, wood shop, gym, and all the rest.

The question is where has all the money gone? Not sure about K12, but at the college level it's very clear, it's all gone to the administrative bureaucracies, with less going to the actual faculty and educational programs.

It's interesting when people advocate for tariffs on China (and sure, other countries, but China is by far the biggest plastic producer) without calling them what they are.

That's part of it but I think it's more complicated than that. For instance I have heard b2b sales described as a diagnostic process. If you know exactly what you can deliver and it matches exactly what the customer needs you encourage them to say yes. It will likely go very well and then the relationship will grow over time. Otherwise you thank them for the opportunity and move on.

The same arguably applies to all business deals and doesn't have much to do with your current level of success. If you pursue the right opportunities you will do well. I know people who have struggled for years because they consistently went after the wrong opportunities. The difficult part of course is being able to tell the difference!

You were hardly alone and you deserve many upvotes for this admission!

> in March when we knew much less about who was most vulnerable

If this is the falsehood we need to perpetuate in order to let guilty politicians save face and restore a semblance of sanity to our society, then so be it, but let's be unambiguously clear, this statement is incorrect.

The correct statement is: researchers knew, leaders ignored them, and media distorted them.

The WHO China joint mission released both CFR data (3.8%) [1] and IFR estimates (0.3%-1%) [2] in February, based on ~44,000 confirmed cases. They were both broken down by age and very similar to later studies based on other cases. There were no surprises after February, unless you were reading news headlines instead of actual research.

CFR as of February 11 [1]:

   CFR     Age
   0.2%  10-19
   0.2%  20-29
   0.2%  30-39
   0.4%  40-49
   1.3%  50-59
   3.6%  60-69
   8.0%  70-79
  14.8%  80+

Very similar age curve to the IFR estimates you posted.

It was already very clear in February that this disease rarely killed anyone under 60, or even 70. Leaders just didn't listen.

To use the USA because I know it best, the first big cluster of fatalities was at a nursing home in Kirkland, WA which wasn't up to code.

So leaders had hard data based on tens of thousands of cases showing that this disease was dangerous to the elderly, and not so dangerous to everyone else. And then the first outbreak kills a bunch of elderly people. Amazingly, they responded to this by locking down the general population, and failing to take targeted measures which would protect the elderly (not sure right now but at one point 50%+ of US Covid deaths were in nursing homes).

It's the biggest failure of leadership in our lifetimes.

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi... (page 12)

[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... (page 2)

[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-covid19-c...

Daryl Davis, an African-American man, famously attended KKK rallies, befriended Klansmen, and over the course of his life helped persuade over 200 Klansmen to give up their robes. He did what you claim is impossible and I can't imagine a better role model.

OK. But if you believed that lie, how many other lies do you believe?

This statement smelled fishy to me as there are only 40M or so people in Iraq to begin with, so I Googled around a bit.

Despite politicians and talking heads claiming for years that either Desert Storm, UN sanctions, or both caused half a million child deaths, evidently most studies found that the child mortality rate in Iraq was unchanged throughout the 1990s.

https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Iraqi-death-toll-doe...

While this apparently fake statistic has mostly been used to criticize the US and UN, it seems Tony Blair used it to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming the dead kids were Saddam's fault.

I guess this is why I don't read the papers much anymore.

To use cyberpunk as an example because it's one of my favorite genres, I wonder how many of the people who buy Cyberpunk2077 will have ever even heard of Shadowrun Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes, or Technobabylon by Wadjet Eye Games. I'm pretty sure that while CP2077 has a vastly larger budget for art, code and Keanu Reeves, it won't even come close to these games in terms of narrative, atmosphere etc.

You're spot on and I wish we knew what to do about it. I think there's a very good parallel between music and games, in both industries it's possible to create great works with innovation, creativity and not much capital. Unfortunately the greatest works don't necessarily bubble up to the top, because the money isn't in producing them, it's in controlling the channels of distribution.

There was great optimism 20+ years ago that the Internet would change this with music, artists would have direct access to their fans, the middle man would be eliminated, and the major labels would crumble. That's not what we got, we just ended up with a new group of megacorps like Apple and Google and Spotify duking it out with the old majors for control of distribution.

To have watched these dreams die in the music industry and see a very similar dynamic unfolding in the digital native industry of games makes me think that maybe this isn't a technology issue, maybe it's something that runs deeper in society and the way people are wired. Then again if we go way back we can argue that the problem was created by technology in the first place (monopolies on music distribution were impossible back when everything was live, they only emerged once we devised technology for recording and copying audio!).

I don't think that consolidation is inevitable at all, Americans are increasingly disillusioned with big business and there is a slowly growing anti-corporate sentiment being expressed (albeit opportunistically) by politicians as varied as Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Marco Rubio and Trump. Matt Stoller's Substack is a great resource to learn more: https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too.

It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore.

My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.

You don't necessarily have to go cold turkey.

I haven't gone all the way and actually gotten rid of my phone, but I personally operate in three "modes:"

- Mode 1 where I'm going to need it for a task like navigation, or I'm OK with killing time and letting my mind wander. I keep it near me, always silent/no vibrate, and check it fairly often.

- Mode 2 where there's a remote chance I may need it because I might need to take a phone call or deal with an OTP. It sits out of sight, preferably in another room entirely.

- Mode 3, the phone is physically powered off. This is pretty much always the case after 8pm, it's frequently the case when I'm working, sometimes the case when I'm out with friends.

In practice I'm almost always in Mode 1 or Mode 3. I accept that it's OK/necessary to submit to distractions (though I do keep it on silent), or I just say screw it and turn it off.

In my experience if you develop a habit like always just powering it off after 8pm, after a few weeks the phone starts to lose its hold on you. You start having moments during the day where you're fiddling with it and your brain just goes "screw this, I would rather be relaxed, happy, and living life." That's the moment where Google, Apple etc. have lost the war they're waging against you, your brain is no longer hijacked, and it all gets better from there.

I don't think it's incorrect to call them states. They're nation states. They are regularly referred to as member states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...

Yeah, it was very different from Uber's fraudulent taxi service and Theranos' fraudulent everything. Where where were the billionaire investors and sycophantic press?

Microsoft makes lots of sense. They own Minecraft and Xbox Live. Both highly social products and roughly the same demographic as Tiktok. Both have tens of millions of young teen users. Tiktok is the perfect complement.

IANAL, but if the lawsuit was about selling smartphones, then yes I think so.

If the lawsuit was about selling some popular class of app in which Apple leveraged its monopoly over app distribution, I think the plaintiff could have a pretty strong case.

I'm not sure that they are. I did say that something smells rotten (products getting worse and prices going up), but this alone is not justification for punitive measures.

The government playbook in this sort of situation is normally to start subpoena'ing emails, execs etc. and look for hard evidence of actual anti-competitive practices. They're not only interested in a business model as it's described in the media, they want to know what company execs actually did. If they find something they file a suit.

I upvoted your comments based on a good faith belief that you're open to learning more about how antitrust law works. It has little to do with market share, and everything to do with a concept called "market power."

Market power is the ability to coerce people into paying more for something via a mechanism other than actually offering a better product or service. A textbook example which most people would agree is bad is a trust/cartel situation where a few players artificially limit supply, and then can raise the price on consumers because there are no competitors. But if a firm is able to drive up prices with impunity for any reason, it's likely they possess market power.

When a firm possesses excess market power it's good for that firm, but bad for the market, consumers, and society. By definition a firm with a lot of market power has very little competition, so even as their margins grow, product quality will decline and price will increase. (Sound like Apple in 2020?) And new firms will find it difficult to compete in that market even as the firm with market power grows very rich, which exacerbates the problem of wealth inequality. (Sound like America in 2020?)

A society which doesn't place some sort of checks on a firm's ability to acquire market power ends up being a place where the way to get ahead is to find an unfair advantage, abuse it, and screw everyone else. (Again, sound familiar?)

At this point it's almost certain that Google is violating antitrust regulation by abusing its market power (proven in the EU, and the US looks poised to start filing lawsuits this year). Apple, Amazon and a few others are up for debate and it's also fair to say that antitrust regulations should evolve to address the tech industry more effectively. The antitrust problem isn't limited to tech however, anti-competitive behaviors of questionable legality have proliferated all over the US since the 80s due to a lax regulatory environment.

If you want to learn more about this topic, Matt Stoller's newsletter "BIG" on Substack is a phenomenal place to start.

When you look at the demographic curve of fatalities it's similar to the flu: it's not deadly to the young and healthy, but it is to the old and sick.

When you look at overall mortality it's not similar to the flu. It's worse. Covid is a bigger killer, with a major reason being the lack of population resistance, vaccination, treatment protocols etc.

I think most discussion misses this point, it is similar in some ways and not in others.

In my view a rational and evidence-based approach would have focused on protecting vulnerable populations from day one. Such policies received little emphasis. Instead, we panicked and implemented measures that destroyed the jobs of healthy people who were living paycheck to paycheck. It's hard to imagine a worse response than one that fails to focus on the core problem and injures millions in the process.

When in history have we ever seen a disease where doctors, the public, or the media said "living in fear for your life is a good idea if you contract this disease?"

If someone contracts a dangerous disease aren't we supposed to reassure them that things will be OK? Isn't that part of good medicine? And yet all of society has turned this idea on its head when it comes to coronavirus. One report after another about how horrific it is. Constant anxiety and fear that takes a real toll on people.

Yes it's worse than the flu, if we take the stats in Los Angeles for example about 2.5% of confirmed cases have died. (Based on this it's a fair guess that less than 1% of all cases, including the unreported ones, have died.) Many people like the author have severe symptoms and then recover.

I have to wonder if this aberrant response to coronavirus says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself. A 24/7 stream of corona terror is being pushed into our eyeballs. How does that help anyone, especially the people who get sick? Does panic, fear, and a response straight from our lizard brains help us end the pandemic? Who decided that mass terror was the best way to beat it? I didn't sign up for this strategy and I bet you didn't either.

Just flag the article and be done with it. My tolerance for clickbait headlines has gone to zero during this pandemic.