aristophenes

15 or so years ago I was in a remote African town and a local business had a picture of Gerald Ford up. Perplexed I asked why. The United States, I presume while Ford was president, had sent aid to build a bridge, some irrigation canals, and eradicated what he described as a worm that you pull out of your skin by wrapping it around a pencil and turning, an inch an hour. I guess it would have been this worm or something similar.

Not a big deal for us, I'm sure hardly anyone outside the area heard of it. But for the locals it changed their lives, the food they could eat, the quality of life they could live. I'd say that I wish we did more stuff like this instead of the geopolitical games, but on another trip I found out that the majority of the Kenyan governments entire budget is foreign aid. Didn't seem to be doing much. But I knew some people from the USA who existed on donations that ran a free school for children, with meals out of a slum. They were poor in the US, but doing so much good. While the official NGO staff drove around in $50,000 SUVs to do surveys.

Doing good is hard. Throwing money at something is not enough. It takes thoughtful, wise people and hard work. But there have been so many people pulled out of really bad conditions over the last few generations. Many many unsung heros.

The implication in the article is that the exhaust gases may not be as significant as the metallic debris that vaporizes in the atmosphere. It sounds very unnatural for the atmosphere to have to deal with this, but here’s an interesting quote regarding meteorites (natural metallic debris):

“Estimates for the mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles.” http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/75-our-solar-syste...

No way, this title is perfect HackerNews clickbait. I was baited, and I was not disappointed by the article. Or at least the abstract, which was as far as I got. TLDR: They figured out how to use tooth enable to make genetic associations between fossils, and learn some other things. And it's a lot more reliable for old fossils than DNA!

Edit: Title at the time of writing my comment is "Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny" which is the actual title from the article

I didn't say being more selfless meant becoming a slave to your employer. I clarified in another post that becoming more selfless can actually help you to leave a toxic environment too. Or maybe you might realize that you were part of the reason it was so toxic, and you take that with you wherever you go. In that case running doesn't help. I don't know what OPs situation is or what yours is. Once you let go of yourself a bit, and readjust your mindset and priorities accordingly, based on whoever you are and whatever situation you are in, then it will likely become more clear what you should do. And it will be easier, and even enjoyable, to do what you should do.

I don't think we were designed to be miserable, so if we are stuck in misery isn't it logical to think we might be pursuing joy in the wrong things?

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I didn't mean that becoming selfless should make you more dedicated to your job. It might do that, depending on your job. But the main thing is that you can start to enjoy everything more, particularly whatever it is you really should be doing.

If you are in a place where you decide you should really be working, then you can work and not feel miserable about it. If you are in a place where you can live a fuller life without working a regular job, then you should do that instead. There's nothing wrong with helping people out at work, while getting money so that you can help yourself and your loved ones out at home. And you can enjoy both parts. As long as you aren't doing something you'd consider evil at your job. Then the same selflessness might help you to either quit or make change inside the company, without having so much fear about what will happen to you.

If you are so miserable while doing any kind of thing in a set way over any length of time, then you may find a soul-crushing moment where you have achieved permanent financial independence, are living your dream, and find this feeling overtaking you again. But this time there is no hope of an eventual way out.

Please understand that I am saying this in a compassionate, not a judgmental way. I think the key developmental step is to be able to get over yourself. I think this is a fundamental part in becoming a mature person. Many of us are forced through this step against our will and maybe without realizing it. Either through our job, or significant other, or kids, or some other experience that just overwhelms you. Apparently you are a tougher nut to crack than most people. It's not easy because it's like part of you has to die and it doesn't go quietly.

But on the other side, where it becomes easy to start thinking about others first, everything starts to fall into place. We were made to be like this. A human child tends to be self-focused. A human adult must be much more selfless. And I don't think we can really be happy until we achieve this state. When you can find joy in satisfying others, you have access to a bottomless well of happiness. (Then it turns out satisfying others is pretty hard even when you are really trying)

It's funny because this is something religion usually stresses as well, so if you've avoided that you really might be missing out.

One great side effect of paternal leave is that it removes a big reason to (consciously or unconsciously) discriminate against women when hiring, as anyone is almost equally likely to eventually take extended leave.

Seems like a lot of American companies have been working pretty hard to get around the sanctions to sell things to black listed Chinese companies. I would take that as pretty good evidence that American companies tend to be independent of the government.

Also it's just pretty clear in general who has what interests in large American corporations. You can look at the chain of command up to the board of directors back to the shareholders.

I prefer the ServeTheHome review, this is more in their wheelhouse: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-deliv...

I’m pretty sure it’s because it’s harder to detect individual stars the farther away from us they are. So you’d expect the stars they found to be clustered around us. We are in the center of that group. The simulation goes back in time to imagine how the stars got to be where they are today.

If the earth was on the other side of the galaxy the group would appear there because the stars we would find would be there. I think the article writer misunderstood the astronomer about this and mismatched responses.

This article seems to be a "no true Scotsman" argument. The paper that it is based on, https://www.nber.org/papers/w19276.pdf , divides entrepreneurs into two groups, those with incorporated businesses and those with unincorporated businesses. Then says those with unincorporated businesses don't count. And then draws conclusions about entrepreneurs based on only the incorporated ones.

Of course unincorporated businesses are limited in size and complexity. Incorporated businesses are going to be made by people familiar with lawyers, business practices, etc. Businesses that require large amounts of capital are more likely to be incorporated. People who actually incorporate their business I suspect are more likely to have had a good education.

So yes, if you exclude all the people who are just hustling along with all the mom and pop businesses, then it seems to be that richer people are what is left.

The article also mentions that both incorporated and unincorporated entrepreneurs were more likely to engage in illicit activities in their youth. So it seems the lede of the article is not supported at all.

The paper that is cited, https://www.nber.org/papers/w19276.pdf divides entrepreneurs into two groups, those with incorporated businesses and those with unincorporated businesses. Then says those with unincorporated businesses don't count. And then draws conclusions about entrepreneurs based on only the incorporated ones.

You can buy them in most MicroCenters today, if they did not all sell out. Amazon has a 3600 and Newegg has 3600 and 3700 but not 3800 and 3900 (don't know if they sold out or if they just don't have them yet).

The short answer is they are available now, if they don't get sold out from your preferred retailer.

The new Ryzens perform very well, it's even more impressive considering that the Intel chips did not have the Fallout/Zombieload mitigations applied[1], that come with significant performance degradations.

LinusTechTips, that used to somewhat favor Intel, did their benchmarks with current patches to everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3aEv3EzMyQ

[1] https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1147867180282699782

> Like, what is Huawei going to do if it has information on you and you live in Boston, compared to the local police?

It could to take what your local industries you are researching and give it to a Chinese company that will take it into the international market. Is that not harmful? Do you think the US government would similarly take your work and send it to a Chinese competitor before it is made public?

AMD has been shipping their new Epyc Rome server CPUs to hyperscalars for a few weeks now [1]. It seems to be a very appealing chip that a lot of them are adopting. They won't be the same as whatever they were using before, so it could be that major updates are needed to include them, meaning that it's just a risky time right now?

[1] Second question in https://www.anandtech.com/show/14568/an-interview-with-amds-...

Not worth it. The cure is just as bad as the potential disease.

On top of that, it probably doesn't even work. Time will tell. However the Uighyers felt about the Chinese before, now they will harbor a white-hot rage. This entire generation of adults can never be trusted by the Chinese, they will have to imprison them forever or kill them. That's basically genocide. Yes if you kill or lock all the people up there will be no more problems. Is that really a good solution? And if the boot ever gets removed from their neck, and they get a chance, they will fight back. Misery upon misery.

My understanding of the structure of the arrangement when I first heard about it was that it was designed to not transfer IP, but to allow China to make their own chip, in a manner of speaking, without actually having the important IP. Even ignoring national obligations, it would just be bad business to hand that over.

"AMD put significant protections in place to protect its intellectual property (IP) and prevent valuable IP from being misused or reverse engineered to develop future generations of processors."

That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if they got the IP anyway, just that wasn't the intention. AMD CEO Lisa Su made some comments a few weeks ago that the joint venture was already dead in the water and was just for one project only. I get the feeling AMD wasn't too happy about the way it all turned out.

Just imagine if that amount of money was spent on updated infrastructure. Effective country wide mass transit, better ports and airports. And the money spent would flow right into the economy and circulate over and over, would push construction companies and techniques forward.

Or towards clean energy generation, storage, and use. How fast would oil and coal be completely replaced? And again, money pumped into the economy to do so.

Or scientific research, space projects, could make large leaps, and again, that money flows back into the economy and multiplies.

Instead we want to make it so the people who hustled through college, picked a cheaper school, worked on the side, paid down their debt if they got any as soon as possible, that those people get the same outcome as someone who got a huge loan and played video games and got drunk every weekend, and spent $200,000 on a degree that only gets you a $50,000/year job?

Imagine an AI without access to external sensors or knowledge of humans. Would they believe in a maker?

Too narrow minded. We create our own new life, of course. Then watch the smartest ones convince the rest that we don't exist.

A highly upvoted comment from that video: "as a mexican I gotta say these mexicans don't represent all the mexicans"

I don't agree, I think this approach is completely legitimate. Because it is prominent politicians who are spreading this message, it is clear where it is coming from and what the motivations are. It isn't manipulation, like seeding articles with a subtext of some idea or another. It is just, here's the governments view of this issue. And then it seems like the idea is for people to think about that, and they will compare to the other idea.

So everyone, including government leaders, get to share their thoughts, people get to choose what is best. If what was described is actually what happens. In the past, the government ideas would be the only ideas shared.

They already did that. Their battery does not have a thermal management system like their competitors do, and so it gets damaged during heavy use or temperature fluctuations. It loses capacity rapidly and must be replaced after 5 years or so if the owner would like to keep a reasonable driving range. Therefore they need to figure out what to do with these bad battery packs, and as the article states they can use it to power street lights as it won't work for the car anymore. I'd recommend searching for other articles about the Nissan Leaf battery to get a better understanding of the situation.

To say that this article is misleading is not enough. This article appears to be deliberately deceptive. Nissan Leafs are specifically known to have battery problems such that they lose a large percentage of their storage after a few years. The reason the batteries need to be recycled for other uses is because they keep having to be replaced, and they need to do something with the old batteries that are no longer useful for cars. Sure the battery might outlive the car, doing something else. Meanwhile, the car will need several battery replacements.

See https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-tr...

Imagine all the people who have never heard about SpaceX that see these. They will think the aliens have arrived :)

Try to picture this. All the water next to a ship mysteriously flowing away from the ship, over the bubble while the ship for some reason is the only thing going down through it.

Water is also heavier than air, and water on top of a bubble will also fall into the center of the bubble (breaking it up into smaller bubbles), until the surface tension of the water around the bubble is great enough to hold it together (small bubble).

Therefore a huge bubble gets split into many bubbles, I suppose at depth a lot of the gas gets dissolved into the water. The worst that would happen is many small bubbles cause the density of the water to decrease, causing the boat to sink lower into the water. I'm not sure if the water could lose enough density to sink a regular boat directly?

I think what you may be thinking of is large, shallow explosions (generally man made) under a ship which create a temporary bubble which then collapses in on itself, but can cause extreme stress on large ships.

Extremely contrived example of bubbles being able to sink a small boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSmAXp_BHcQ

How a bubble generated by an explosion can actually sink a large ship: https://youtu.be/UdFNuc5XtII?t=192

Not exactly the right link, that is for the server chips. This one is for the consumer CPUs: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mds-zomb...

That would be reasonable, but China has had such an advantage for so long that just getting them to a level playing field will appear to be a devastating loss. This has been furthered by how the situation has been portrayed in the media in both China and the US and around the world, with the US as the aggressor. I believe this has caused the Chinese government to miscalculate, thinking the US will lose support and back down. Instead they have been backed into a corner. Saving face is life or death for the Chinese government, so the US getting an advantageous deal would require literally world war III and I don't think anyone involved is stupid enough to actually try to make that happen.

I expect that the tariffs will stay in place permanently because any acceptable deal would require the Chinese publicly harassing their own people on behalf of the US government, and there is no way the US could enforce that. So the easiest solution are tariffs that will rebalance trade naturally, and probably the world polarizing into two main economic zones, US-centric and China-centric. And then we all just try not to kill each other for the forseeable future.

The thing that really annoys me about this is that if China would just be patient and play by the rules, be genuinely friendly to its neighbors, it would take them like 20 or 30 years longer but then the whole world would just place the crown on their head and they would peacefully become the world's only superpower. Naturally, maybe even justly. Now we all get misery because of impatience.

Let me give it a shot with actual references, and years of paying attention, not whatever I heard the talking heads say last night.

The US perceives the economic relationship with China to be one way. Prior to the recent trade flair ups, China was given preferential treatment, perhaps as part of a strategy to create a geopolitical ally instead of an enemy through trade. This appeared to be working for several decades with China opening up to the world and giving the appearance of freer markets and more democratization as they became wealthier. As their economy continued to grow and modernize, the trade imbalance between the United States became huge ($539 Billion in imports in 2018, only $120 Billion in exports [0]). This means that each year hundreds of billions of dollars flows directly from the US economy into the Chinese economy. In addition, with President Xi the country appears to be sliding back towards a nationalistic totalitarianism.

While both countries can still benefit from this trade, the US government is taking the stance that China has been benefiting and the US has not. The reasons that are most often cited are that the US was open to almost all Chinese imports, while many US imports were restricted or taxed more heavily than local goods [1]. Worse than that, if a US company wanted to operate in China, they were required to do so through Chinese partners that would own half of a joint venture, and intellectual property would be shared with them. After a short term benefit, all of a sudden the Chinese partner would be running their own factories, and competing against the US company with the US companies own technology. These companies are often state owned and receive funding that is considered to be anti free trade and is generally illegal in most international agreements (see the legal squabbles between Airbus and Boeing for reference). Finally the US company would be squeezed by the Chinese government (national or local), and all sorts of issues that wouldn't impact the local company would mysteriously befall the foreign company. After local Chinese companies were created, funded and protected in China by the Chinese government, they could compete with their former US partners around the world.

Therefore while the US market was open to China, the Chinese market is not really open to the US. Finally, it has been widely known for a long time that China hosts state sponsored industrial espionage units that hack companies around the world and steal intellectual property to provide to Chinese companies[2]. US companies will spend billions of dollars researching how to do something, and then a Chinese company can just start producing it, sometimes even before the US company does. Finally, it seems like laws are not enforced in favor of US victims. If a US company steals and sells Chinese IP, they can be successfully sued in US courts. If a Chinese company steals and sells US IP, no enforcement is taken. This is a huge problem especially for small inventors, the moment they create something they lose the market to cheap Chinese knockoffs, and have no power to protect their brand or invention.

For these reasons and others, China is viewed as having a predatory trade relationship with the United States. I've heard that Huawei in particular is known to have gotten a big jump by outright stealing Cisco's router and selling it[3], and has continued with similar tactics, alongside the accusations that it is essentially an arm of Chinese intelligence services and provides backdoors in their products. I've actually heard from Chinese friends that Huawei was very proud of their ability to steal Cisco's router and it is used as a case study.

And while all this is happening, the US had a special trade relationship with China such that it was cheaper to ship goods to individuals in the US from China, instead of from inside the US itself[4].

So basically a viewpoint that I tend to agree with is that this is all about resetting the trade relationship to a normal one between peers. The US is no longer supporting a third world country, but dealing with a fellow world power that is fully capable of taking care of itself. I am confused myself why it is being portrayed any other way, and what the motivations are for doing so. It seems to me that the US has demands to be treated fairly and have an equal trading relationship (according to their point of view), and if that doesn't happen the US can impose tariffs that will rebalance trade between the two countries.

[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-all-the-stuff-the-us... [1] https://www.export.gov/article?id=China-Import-Tariffs [2] (pdf) https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf... [3] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...