blix

TSA Pre-Check's artifically low, non-market price for line cutting is the reason Clear isn't selling for $100+ per flight, with several layers of price discrimination.

"I pay money to cut people in line, but someone else paid more money to cut me in line!"

> "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.

Has there ever been, in the history of human civilization, any self-styled democracy that did not weigh the votes of some people more the votes of others? Whether by sex, gender, race, wealth, education, criminal status, party membership, age, or status as an elected official, I'm pretty sure every single democratic state has continuously subscribed to some non-uniform distribution of vote weights.

With modern technology, it maybe possible to create a truly direct and equal system where newborns have the ability to ratify trade deals, but this might not be desirable.

'Extreme' and 'unhinged' only have meaning relative to a baseline of what is widely believed and accepted.

Academics can't effectively organize because the pool of people who want to be professors but can't find a position is huge, and consequently the demands to simply stay afloat are so large that it doesn't leave a lot of time for much else.

Rather than calling it sloppy, I would instead say types barely exist at all in C. A type in C is really just a transient label reminding you and the compiler how to interepret some block of 1's and 0's, which is the only true type.

The Python type system really has quite a lot of overhead compared to this :P

If you're doing a 600 mile road trip in the USA, it's already hard enough at times to find worthwhile places to eat without also limiting your choices to those with fast chargers nearby. Same for lodging if it's a really long trip.

This isn't an important use case for a lot of people, but's it's much more important to me than commuting :)

A society composed of 99% peasants, who all earn and own about the same amount, and 1% nobles (who dont 'earn wages' and own many times more than all peasants combined) would look very good through many social mobility metrics.

I don't think this shows the entire picture.

The USA has larger disparaties across quintiles, in large parts due to its history as a country of (sometimes involuntary) immigrants. I think it will be interesting to see how Sweden's favorable metrics here change as a result of their wave of unskilled immigration, which is probably too recent to be fully incoporated in any generational study. I'd also be interested to see mobility in 'absolute' terms, perhaps relative to global percentiles. Moving up 10% in a very disparate country might reflect more social motion than jumping two quintiles in a very flat country.

Also, moving between income quintiles misses other aspects that might be relevant for a broader definition of social mobility: moving into the top 1% or top 0.1% of income and any movement in wealth. I'm not having luck finding a source at this moment, but I recall seeing that the USA performs favorably on this metric compared to europeans with millenial legacies of state-sanctioned hereditary nobility.

I've never heard this before. Can you point me some place where I can read more?

Apparently adding a new member to a group text with an android user is a much less pleasant experience than if everyone is on imessage. I'm the android user causing problems so I dont really know the details :P But honestly that the guy singled out the "one android user" who was making his life difficult was disconerting to say the least.

I almost always have my phone on silent for that reason. I like to check my phone when I want to, not when it wants me to.

I'm pretty certain that a lot more interaction occurs through phones than through jeans.

As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.

When I was an undergrad looking for internships, many of the most desriable had hard GPA cutoffs. I'm pretty sure these were not flexibly adjusted for every single applicant depending on their university and specific course load.

Tomato tomahto.

The important thing is establishing that one group has too many resources which rightfully belong to some other group. The rest is implementation detail.

It's a good thing we aren't using updated updated-on-the-fly computer systems for controlling powerplants, chemical refineries, trading on finacial markets or driving cars!

I wonder if there are any historical examples of racial discrimination justified by invoking evolution.

This argument is hilarious but this is not a turn I expected it to take.

Each train would have a sensor which would be able to detect changes and update the database. Maps could easily be regional.

I feel your doctor pain. I hope you find an answer. Actually, doctors may be one the more guilty professions when it comes to shallow knowledge without application. I like to see how many times I can ask a doctor 'why' or 'how' before they become frustrated with me for wasting their expensive time :P

> you can be fairly sure that you all read the same thing

I don't think this is a given. The bible has been around for a long time, but for whatever reason there have been disputes over what information exactly is encoded in it that have been going on for centuries. It's definitely a little more consistent the spoken word though!

Dialogue has several distinct advantages over reading when it comes to learning. I think we both agree that applied knowledge is best, but this can only be gained through application. Dialogue forces you synthesize ideas into new statements and respond to challenges to those statements which is intrinsically more applied than simply reading alone.

There's a good amount of research inicating that discussion and speaking lead to significantly more information retention than hearing or reading. The more individual the learning process is, the fewer opportunities there are for discussion. This is why I get into silly arguments on HN in the first place, gotta supplement that reading ;)

Reading makes knowledge acquisition easier, but it also decreases the fraction of knowledge that comes bundled with expert 1-on-1. This has both advantages and disadvantages.

> He mentioned instruction, but he fails to notice that reading and hearing can both happen, as they do happen without instruction.

> ... they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant

By claiming he doesn't notice something that he clearly and explicitly mentions, I feel you are directly making his point.

Is Ammon not absolutely right?

New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.

OK, but why choose any one system over any others? Why chose base 10 over base 2? Why choose the current definition of the meter as opposed to some other length?

There are an infinite number of possible coherent unit systems, all of them totally arbitrary. Why should any system be preferred over the rest?

I think you can value Life without maximizing number of total deaths (or total lives lived, same thing). At some point quality matters as well as quantity.

If maximizing the total number of lives is really all that's important, we should cease all human activity that isn't necessary to sending ants to other planets.

That's great, but it makes even less sense to accuse someone of lying about their experiences if it is something that should be reasonably expected. What a strange reaction.

I don't think I've ever heard someone proclaim such trust in the CPD.

The original comment just says the cops refused to chase... which you yourself acknowledge as likely in a child comment. If you believe that carjackings happen and that the police are unlikely to chase, I'm not sure what else there is to deny.

That is, other than the implicit challenge to the idea of an extremely safe gentrified Chicago. Violent crime doesn't only happen in Englewood. There's a pretty wide range of neighborhoods between Garfield Park and Edgebrook.

I'm sorry I'm trying to follow your argument here. Are you saying that because you have never been carjacked or mugged in the loop that it has never happened to anyone else? Or that because you had one rapid response by the police that all police responses are rapid?

I grew up in Chicago, many of my family and friends still live there. I would categorize your experience as both atypical and extremely privileged. You should hesitate before extrapolating.

> In reality, the vast majority of his predictions over the past two decades have not come true e.g. saying China, Russia, and Canada would all break up by 2020.

Two decades? Is there some other source for these predictions other than the book series he kicked off 8 years ago?

The claims in his 2014 book are much more measured:

- Russia needs to deal with Ukraine by 2020 (one of his few concrete timelines, a couple years off)

- Increased Albertan autonomy will enter mainsteam political discussion (Danielle Smith)

- China will run into issues from an unstable financial system (Evergrande)

I think it's clear his background is not technical, he's more than a little hyperbolic, but I don't think he does as poorly as you mark him. Unless he has some other more aggressive set of predictions than the ones I've found, he still has a good 30 years before he can safely be called a hack.

> Quartz is not amorphous silica, and unlike amorphous silica, it's carcinogenic if you inhale it.

Crystalline silica is still silica.

> You don't get nanometer-sized structural changes in teflon by scraping it off your skillet with a spatula. You're being ridiculous.

The words of someone who has not spent time analyzing electron microscopy of fracture surfaces :) It absolutely does without any possible shred of doubt. But that's not even the point; the point is that the fine physical structure of compounds can matter in biological systems. If you accept this, that it is plainly obvious that chemical inertness of a compounds is an obviously insufficent condition for safety.

> I'm interested to hear what response you get from biologists when you propose to them that natural selection might be inoperative in the split-leaf philodendron. I imagine they'll wish they had a PTFE cord handy.

If you spend a lot of time around people with science PhDs, you will quickly learn that most of us are keenly aware of how little we actually know and how much of it is guessing. Murdering people over disagreements is the domain of religions, not science. Sadly for many these two are interchangable.

Science discussion here is often lacking. I'm not sure where the right forum is for that :P

I think the topological bond analysis is actually really cool, and I think it might have wide-reaching implications in the study of liquids. I wonder if you looked closely at liquid phases without "long-range order", if you might occasioanlly see something resembling order if you looked through this lens rather than through the radial density function.