The only thing worse for an authoritarian regime than making a show of force and following up on it is to make the show of force and not follow up on it.
7,823 karma · joined October 14, 2011
1. the color of the beekeepers' skin is irrelevant and appears to have been an addition made by the poster
2. "The duo bought their first vacant space on Detroit’s East Side for $340 with the help of the Detroit Land Bank Authority, an agency that works to redevelop abandoned properties."
That is a redevelopment effort designed to get action.
Can anyone comment on how this program and zoning requirements interact?
Why doesn't this article directly link to the allegedly leaked documents?
The quoted paragraph (the article's first paragraph) contains a link to a Tweet which links to a blog post which links to a CNN article.
AFAICT, none of them link to the actual documents.
To future journalists: link to the documents in your article. Otherwise you run the risk of readers writing the whole thing off as a misinformation campaign. This possibility can't be ruled out at this point.
> ... not growing but it's not dying. ... and the founder doesn't really know what to do.
Makes me think of Paul Graham's concept of "default alive/dead":
> When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?
http://paulgraham.com/aord.html
I think this is a much more valuable place to start the conversation. The available options (which may or may not include shutdown) depend strongly on the answer to the question "are you default alive or default dead?"
> When I heard that Richard was in a bad way, I figured he was at a low point in another cycle. I expected that I would just see him at the Plough the next time I dropped in. Instead, he died.
Nothing is said about what killed him, but I suspect there might be a clue here:
> Arguably, their [bars'] lifeblood—alcohol—has destroyed more American families than any drug ever has. Now the owner of the Plough, I struggle with this truth. My own family has been afflicted by alcoholism, and while “the gene,” as it is often called, bypassed me, I worry for my four-year-old twin boys. Recently, one of them snuck a sip of my beer, then thrust his right fist in the air in triumph and shouted in his deepest voice, “I am a man!” before running away gleefully. I laughed, but the episode also stabbed me with worry that he may be carrying a ticking time bomb.
It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics that must be necessary by the owner to keep this business going.
Some patrons may be staying home, but it looks to me as if a plethora of alternative hangouts and ways to meet, not centered on alcohol, have popped up over the years:
- Meetup groups
- juice/hookah/vegan/whatever bars
- exercise/yoga classes and groups
- hookup apps
> Researchers at Rice University developed a method to convert heat into light that could boost solar efficiency from 22% to 80%
The conditional tense signals that the researchers didn't actually do so, but that the study might enable it. The article re-iterates that this is speculation:
> The implications of their discovery are significant. Research from Chloe Doiron, a Rice graduate student, revealed that 20% of industrial energy consumption is wasted through heat. It could also mean an increase in the efficiency of solar cells, which are currently only 22% efficient at their peak. Recycling the thermal energy from solar cells using carbon nanotube technology could increase the efficiency to 80% according to the researchers. ...
What obligation is the state under to provide the means to refund what I understand to be a refundable deposit paid at the time of purchase?
The article fails to point out that it was the Obama administration that really turned up the heat on whistleblowers:
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10...
I suspect that at the time many Obama supporters simply didn't care. Their guy was in charge and that was that.
Short-sighted to be sure.
Far too few considered the possibility that the opposition was watching and learning what new things might be possible.
Not just zero, but beyond.
The yield out to 30 years on German bonds recently fell below zero. Several other advanced industrial countries are in a similar negative-yielding boat. These are economies that are technically not even in recession.
The amount of negative yielding debt now exceeds $13 trillion:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/value-of-debt-with-negativ...
That's not a negative real rate (rate - inflation) which is not uncommon, it's an absolute (nominal) interest rate.
No country wants to be left with the currency that appreciates. All countries will pull out the stops to find a way to devalue.
The only thing industrialized countries fear more than an appreciating currency is deflation. The first whiff of that monster and the big guns come out and never stop firing.
At this point it's not unreasonable to expect the following possibilities (in order of first appearance):
0. zero short term rates to follow much quicker than consensus
1. shock-and-awe QE (first implemented, but in a way that will look quaint by comparison, in 2008-2009 crisis)
2. direct purchase of stocks by the Fed and the ECB (Bank of Japan has been doing this for a long time)
3. debt forgiveness for college loans (regardless of the party in power)
4. debt forgiveness for mortgages (discussed in 2008-2009 but never tried)
5. credit card debt forgiveness (because why not, every other debt is being forgiven)
Oddly enough, the later phases start to look like the systemic debt repudiation brought about through the "jubilee year":
> Ancient Near Eastern societies regularly declared noncommercial debts void, typically at the coronation of a new king or at the king’s order.
> What if unions gave perks to employees including job references, health benefits, etc BUT to participate in the union you had to put forth a $5k bond. This could be deducted slowly over time from your paycheck.
> ...
> Consumers could do something similar for corporations as well. Have reserved payments given out over time but only if the companies don’t create any externalities for which the consumer doesn’t approve.
There are multiple practical problems with these approaches, which might be grouped into two broad categories:
1. How do you prevent collusion? I defect and pay you to keep quiet. Or I pay you to falsely accuse another member of having defected.
2. What due process determines whether defection has occurred?
In the constrained world of a system like Bitcoin, this can be easy, but only if the outside world doesn't enter. The minute we start invoking oracles to inject external state, then the entire system begins to revolve around how to prevent the same kinds of collusion/misrepresentation behaviors in the oracles.
Stepping back from the details of this story reveals a striking pattern that most public discussions on mass surveillance miss entirely.
Cost has protected citizens of the world's liberal democracies from sliding into totalitarianism for a long time. Now the brakes are off. Surveillance technology costs are plunging across at the board and capabilities are skyrocketing.
Regardless of size or jurisdiction, there isn't a law enforcement agency out there that doesn't want to (or actively seek to) increase its observational capability.
Tumbling prices allow these organizations to indulge these urges.
Suddenly, basic assumptions about what governments can and can't do go out the window. The equipment is bought and put into production. Better to ask forgiveness than permission and all that.
There is no limit to the appetite for greater visibility into the private lives of citizens. Today it's the war on drugs and terror. Tomorrow it's something else. The justifications change, but these are just thin veneers over the ugly truth. Every government tends toward totalitarianism unless kept in check by something pretty damn powerful.
This train has one destination, and it's not even clear if there will be any stops along the way. To understand where we're headed, try reading the Bill of Rights with the assumption that your government knows everything there is to know about you, and where those who attempt to reveal the extent of these capabilities are imprisoned or executed.
Rate goes down, and your interest payment goes down.
I suspect this has to do with fact that there has never been a rate decrease in the lifetime of the product:
> Wealthfront Inc. is an automated investment service firm based in Redwood City, California,[2][3][4][5] founded by Andy Rachleff and Dan Carroll in 2008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthfront
The decrease came only as a surprise to those who weren't paying attention.
The rate is in all likelihood headed to zero and below, just like so many other industrialized economies have already done.
If that comes as a surprise then once again, you haven't been paying attention.
> The new study suggests that life's dependence on these 20 [naturally-occurring] amino acids is no accident. The researchers show that the kinds of amino acids used in proteins are more likely to link up together because they react together more efficiently and have few inefficient side reactions.
This is an odd leap.
Protein synthesis is an extremely complex process involving not just enzymes (amino acid chains), but other stuff like DNA, RNA, lipids, energy transduction, and sugars. Highly organized compartments are key - without them nothing remotely resembling life occurs.
The lack of any convincing pathway from random amino acid chains to life is a big limitation here.
For example, it's entirely possible that peptides occurred relatively late in the chemical evolution of self-replicating systems. Only after sufficient machinery had been built up could anything as complex as a well-defined peptide chain be produced.
Along these lines, a different study looking at how chemical microenvironment could have developed abiotically might be of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20505689
On the other hand, if it turned out that certain chemically active amino acid chains tended to form more readily than others in a re-evaporator environment, that could offer an explanation: enzymes (amino acid chain catalysts) form naturally without any other intervention by virtue of the relative reactivity of the growing chain with the next amino acid. Maybe there's even some self-catalysis and/or other selection mechanism at some point. AFAICT, the paper doesn't deal with this possibility, though.
The article bases its warning on this "equilibrium climate sensitivity" metric (aka "sensitivity"). This widely-used benchmarks allows the many different lines of evidence to be used together and translated into real-world effects.
The article cites a pre-industrial CO2 measurement of 280ppm, and a current measurement of 410ppm. If current trends hold, the doubling point (560ppm CO2) will occur in 2060.
The rest of the article deals with models that are predicting much higher sensitivity than earlier models. In 2013 the estimate was 1.5 - 4.5 degrees C. The new models are predicting 2.8 - 5.8 degrees C, with eight of the (unknown total) models predicting 5 degrees or higher. These results are scheduled to be published in the 2021 IPCC report.
For comparison, the Paris Agreement seeks to limit temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees C.
What would 5 degrees C warming mean for the Earth?
> The most comprehensive summary of conditions experienced during past warm periods in the Earth’s recent history was published in June 2018 ... by 59 leading experts from 17 countries. The report concluded that warming of between 1.5 and 2°C in the past was enough to see significant shifts in climate zones, and land and aquatic ecosystems “spatially reorganize”.
> These changes triggered substantial long-term melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6 to 13 metres of global sea-level rise lasting thousands of years.
To the extent that the models are right and the study of past warming incidents applies in the future, we can expect sea level rises in excess of 6 - 13 meters (lasting thousands of years) by 2060 and significant shifts in climate zones.
Reminds me of a quote to the effect of "I'm not sure what the future holds, but I know I won't approve."
I wonder what parents 100 years from now will have to say about today's handwringing over computer time.
On the one hand, it may seem impossible that a parent would deliberately subject a child to such overt sabotage of future professional prospects.
On the other hand, future parents may be astonished at how much leeway kids today have with respect to information devices - in much the same way that today's new parents can barely believe there was a time when kids walked and rode bikes to school on their own, and generally ran around the neighborhood more or less unsupervised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8m4jYaALIA
Without video of the filter in action, I'm skeptical of the claim.
It seems plausible that the person on the left is using a filter of some kind.
> When the polls close, members of each county clerk’s staff insert two cryptographically secure thumb drives into the vendor’s administrative portal laptop. Once the two thumb drives are verified, votes on the blockchain are automatically assembled as PDF files for each county. The Secretary of State’s office sends each county one PDF file containing all the marked ballots submitted by voters of that county. The clerk’s staff prints the ballots on cardstock with a ballot printer capable of printing up to 20” two-sided ballots (see Fig. 4). Each printed ballot contains the anonymous ID of the voter (see highlight in Fig. 5). Tabulation and the consolidation of results is done automatically by scanning the paper ballot into the precinct tabulator of the primary voting system (see Fig. 6).
https://sos.wv.gov/FormSearch/Elections/Informational/West-V...
How do the clerks get these thumb drives? What's the protocol for storage until used? Who has access to them? What physical security features do the drives implement?
If I were going to attack this system, the thumb drives seem like a juicy target with plenty of social engineering opportunities.
All is not lost. Consumers can be responsible by radically cutting consumption.
Most of the speech was an appeal to support "nature," specifically building up habitats for aquatic and terrestrial plants, which he claims represents "30% of what needs to be done to avoid catastrophic warming." Just focusing on emissions won't solve the problem.
https://youtu.be/FuxHDD_pLf0?t=17121
He further claims that giving power to indigenous people to use their historical knowledge will help.
I'm not so sure. Burning forests has been used for centuries by indigenous people in the Americas. It transformed the landscape radically, as described in the book 1491 by Mann.
There's currently speculation that the "Little Ice Age" of (ca. 1600s-1700s) was actually a rebound event caused by the mass extinction of indigenous peoples from the Americas due to smallpox and other plagues brought by Europeans:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/31/european...
In other words, wiping out the people who were burning forests regularly caused reforestation and uptake of CO2 large enough to cause global cooling.
In a sense, Ford is right - reforestation has the potential to reverse the trend of rising CO2. But in another sense, Ford is wrong in that turning lands over to indigenous people could actually accelerate the release of CO2 and loss of forest.
There are no good choices. Part of the problem is that the ideal course of action is murky at best, and will involve mass displacements at worst. There is no "science" of global terraforming, and we only incompletely understand all the factors influencing climate. Imagining otherwise won't solve the problems.
We know that in its institutional panic the US Fed pumped trillions of dollars into the economy in the form of QE 1-3:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
Central banks around the world have followed the US lead in a coordinated effort to pump up the volume and avoid currency appreciation against the dollar.
The Fed for its part is now done with its feeble attempts to draw down its balance sheet. The only reasonable conclusion is that more QE will be on tap at the first hint of either deflation or economic weakness.
This created the everything bubble we now face. Prices have become so distorted that it's impossible to value anything or even rationally discuss the end of the cycle.
The entire episode is without precedent and will probably end in an unprecedented way.
Trends with little to no mainstream opposition are fascinating. I'm thinking of things like smoking, disco, the real estate bubble, the dot com bubble, and hairbands. Suddenly, everywhere you look it's been normalized. Given enough time, they're all repudiated - strongly and viscerally.
I wonder if the tattoo will join their ranks.
The article is a list of 30 items in the category "mental model" bracketed by some high-level opinions. Included on the list are:
- areas of research ("game theory")
- broad motivational factors ("incentive"
- basic business terms ("margin of safety")
In other words, I wouldn't consider many of these things to be mental models.
Furthermore, the article offers no examples of the "great power" of mental models.
Unfortunately, this article isn't unique in mental model discussions. Most of them follow the same pattern.
To future authors: the world doesn't need yet another recapitulation of a list from Wikipedia on mental models.
Instead, try taking an item on the list and doing something surprising or unique with it.
If it seems like an anti-pattern ("tribalism"), show how useful it can be to the reader. If it's vague ("signaling theory"), give down-to-earth examples illustrating how to use its principles in daily life. If it seems like something that "mental gymnasts" would do all the time ("backward chaining"), expose its pitfalls.
Or, try to develop a good definition of the term "mental model." I see it used far too frequently with a citation to some other source. The author does this, but the quote doesn't clear up much. The definition on Wikipedia is just plain vague and may explain why these lists tend to include things that don't seem to be actual mental models but rather fields of study.
It's a little like we're trying to reconstruct modern industrial civilization by assuming Dow Chemical exists whenever necessary. Dow and the entire chemical industry arose from a bootstrapping process in which simple feedstocks become ever more complex inputs to ever more specialized industries. The Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without it.
This study looks at the ability of alpha-hydroxy acids to spontaneously assemble semi-permeable compartments ("microdroplets") that could have played an early role, concentrating reactive species and enabling reactions that couldn't take place otherwise. As such, they'd serve as a kind of scaffolding. Useful for a time, and then discarded with the appearance of better structures.
Four out of 5 of these candidates (which are all hydroxy analogs of amino acids), are chiral. The rate of formation, permeability, and durability of the compartments formed might expected to depend on the enantiomeric purity of the starting hydroxy acids.
Surprisingly, the study apparently says nothing about enantioenrichment of the alpha-hydroxy acids. Then again, the study only begins to scratch the surface of what this new chemical system might be capable of.
AFAICT, this is a brand new, highly hackable chemical system with vast potential not just in the origin of life, but across chemistry and biology.
So far, the study only demonstrates inclusion of dyes. The real test will be to get these things to facilitate reactions that would not occur in the surrounding medium.
Two things about this odd quote, which dances on the edge of the Orwellian "nothing to hide" argument:
1. I'd put the odds that current president has in fact stored the nuclear launch codes on a "consumer product" at 50:50. He's shown a shocking disregard and disdain for protocol. The way in which diplomacy is carried out through Twitter suggests he's not capable of evaluating the threats posed his uses of consumer-grade technology.
2. Barr assumes a threat model involving petty criminals. The real threat is the US federal government, which has demonstrated repeated disregard, under multiple administrations, for search and seizure boundaries set by the Constitution.
> So why don’t local governments embrace more of this sort of pop up grass roots mom and pop enterprise? Officials are in a trap that requires them to boost tax revenue to pay for all the attenuated infrastructure and municipal overhead that’s accumulated for decades. Highly functional flea markets don’t generate enough cash surplus to skim. So municipalities are obliged to search for show horses with all the associated prestige, complexity, and expense. ...
Those local governments probably bought into the Growth Ponzi Scheme and are now trapped in an endless cycle of megacorp courthship that with each iteration further destroys the means for the area to survive independently:
By this standard, I suspect at least half the US population could be rounded up and held unconstitutionally:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/after/p...
The article doesn't give much to go on regarding details of th case. FWIW, the idea that being born on US soil makes you a citizen (as plainly stated in the 14th amendment) appears to still be controversial:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_citizenship_in_th...
1. Understanding how the language works. Additionally understanding how the language infrastructure interfaces with the computer.
2. Anticipating problems. Prefer solid foundations over veneers that appear to get the job done.
3. Organizing and designing systems. Essentially, SOLID.
Two things on this:
First, bad code often results from conflicting goals. Moving goalposts and on time shipping, for example. The result appears to have been written by a poor programmer, when this may not be the case.
Second, the most valuable skill a programmer can have isn't technical, but rater social: empathy. The best programmers I've seen have it and the worst completely lack it.
Lack of empathy leads to poor communication. If programmer can't anticipate or read his/her audience's perspective, there's no way s/he can communicate a complex concept to them. The temptation will be to blame the audience when in fact the failure lies squarely with the programmer doing the speaking or writing.
Lack of empathy also leads to disregard for the needs of users and future maintainers. Systems get built that don't need building, and systems that should be built aren't. Should the two happen to coincide, the system is a nightmare to maintain because the programmer simply didn't care about the people who would need to maintain the contraption.
A lot of the 10x programmer discussion focussed on people who lack empathy. For some reason, it's easy to conflate lack of empathy with technical skill.
Take this one for example, which appears well into the article:
> Part of Tippens’ treatment regimen was CBD.
Nowhere does the article describe in one place exactly what the treatment regimen was.
Was it just CBD + fenbendazole or other components? When did the CBD begin? Even the nature of the trial (?) that Tippens was part of (or not) during his cure is cloudy.