causalmodels

It depends on the type of growth. Growth through efficiency gains extends the productivity runway of economies reliant on finite resource consumption.

I think consequences of a no growth economy are pretty bad. It would mean much more of the world becoming zero sum. The pie would be fixed.

Fast.ai works pretty well when you're working on standard tasks but starts to fall apart when you want to do something more exotic.

That’s is because the electric company are monopolies created by the government. And unlike power utilities there are zero laws about which cloud provider you are forced to used.

Parler is not some rube. They are a company with access to legal counsel. They agreed to moderate their end users in accordance with Amazon’s content policy and chose not to. They made extremely stupid decisions they do not deserve to be coddled for.

Parler agreed to abide by Amazon’s moderation policy and it agreed that it was responsible for the content of its end users.

My landlord has a ‘no parties’ clause in my lease because my apartment is in a factory and someone could be easily hurt if one of the machines turned on. I agreed to this contract. If I break it my landlord is within their right to terminate my lease.

I'm sure their fancier equipment is probably a nightmare of a time sink but the little kits you can buy are dead simple for nontechnical people to set up and use. My parents have plaster walls and the modem lives in the basement so they have huge problems with coverage even though their house isn't very big. This is sort of silly but they connection speed gage on their router is super helpful because they get confused with things like checking internet speed.

I think Gab [1] is a relevant example. They were dropped by their GoDaddy, Stripe, PayPal, etc. after the tree of life shooter posted their manifesto on the site. Another example would be Cloudflare dropping 8chan [2] after the El Paso shooter, Christchurch shooter, and Poway synagogue shooter used the site to post their manifestos. Cloudflare also dropped support for the neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer [3] although my impression is that the reason for termination was deeply related to people on the website claiming their continued business relationship signaled ideological sympathy on the part of Cloudflare [4 -- about halfway down]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/far-right-social-network-g...

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

[3]https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

[4] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

The one where they were trying spin forced IUDs and sterilizations as a way to promote gender equity and reproductive health[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/twitter-takes-do...

This is an anecdote but I think it's worth mentioning.

Several years ago my washer dryer unit developed a crack in the wash basin. Instead of buying a new machine, I ordered a replacement basin from GE. When I received the part, it had developed a crack from shipping. I was told to throw the broken replacement part in the trash and they would send me another. This happened two more times. It took four shipments of new wash basins for me to actually repair the machine.

Right to repair is a good thing in and of itself. We shouldn't need to couch pro consumer movements in terms of other good objectives like resource conservation or environmentalism. I understand that my experience is probably not typical, but one screw up like mine basically wiped out any gain conservationist gains for me and several other people. If we want to further conservation and environmental efforts we should do so explicitly rather than achieving half measures on the back of other causes.

The PS5 is running a backported PS4 game. There is no release for the current console generation.

Do people actually care about GPUs in their laptops? It seems like any semi-serious gamer would have strong incentives to have a desktop (modular, the prestige of building you own rig). And anyone using GPUs for compute is just going to remote into some server.

I don't believe Air's M1 has any virtualization support at all.

It's already been done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od-1cEac9U4&feature=emb_titl...

Yes. GPU RAM is a major bottleneck for my personal work and buying cards is still cheaper in the long run than renting.

edit: Also CUDA is just too important to switch to AMD.

Problem with a no plugin version is that I bet the user numbers would drop severely and the ecosystem would die as a result.

Incomes have gone up, including for the unemployed. Fiscal stimulus can accomplish much more than monetary policy through the multiplier so comparing headline numbers doesn't mean anything.

And yeah rich people own assets. That's like the definition of a rich person. Take your ax and grind it somewhere else.

This system isn't a failure. People's incomes have gone up during the pandemic so the stock market has also gone up.

There is a dire problem around the collapse of small businesses, but rich people usually get rich through capital markets rather than small business.

I think using Mapquest and Yelp as examples harms your argument.

Mapquest and google maps are fundamentally different products. Google maps is a geo database that happens to also give good driving directions. Mapquest just gave people directions. A better example would be google's Waze acquisition, but even that one is not very comparable.

Yelp is basically a protection racket whose sole purpose is to squeeze money from small single location restaurants. They actively harm their customers by promoting reviews based on whether or not you pay them. They are a modern day BBB

Rail cannot get adequate funding for even basic maintenance and upkeep and upgrades, let alone modernization, because of widespread corruption among government officials and public sector workers. I'm sure public perception plays some role but it is not the root cause for our current situation.

This reminds me of a little trick I learned while working in finance.

If you have bad credit but have over $1,000 in cash, go and get an unsecured loan for roughly 90% of your cash on hand. Ideally the terms should have a negligible or nonexistent prepayment penalty. Once you have the loan, repay it within 2-3 business days.

Rinse and repeat until your credit score starts to improve.

The blanket eviction moratorium has expired in NYC. You can now be brought to court for failure to pay, but if you can prove financial hardship they can't kick you out. This is a fairly substantial burden. I'm afraid what will happen since people can't afford rent let alone legal representation.

I believe what they were referring to was the death of news subscription model

Maybe not in the states you’ve lived in, but this was very much the hypothesis behind Sam Brownback’s experiment in Kansas. Beliefs in a strong version of the crowding out effect result in states trying to cut their budgets.

Face masks won't stop gait recognition. Biometrics are a hard thing to escape

Sterling is terrible not only because they’re needlessly invasive, but also because they cannot run a background check.

Before I got into software I was a model, something very obvious if you search my name. I’ve had two background checks done by Sterling and they’ve never connected the dots.

I understand and agree with the outcry around using ML areas like criminal justice, but there are some really compelling examples of ML being used by governments to help citizens[1].

[1] https://www.kdd.org/kdd2018/accepted-papers/view/activeremed...

I participated in the clinical trials for this and used them regularly between 2008-ish (it's hard to remember since I was in middle school) and 2015.

The results were remarkable but the contacts themselves where insanely uncomfortable.

> Letting someone else do it undermines the whole purposes of the independent financial system.

Even small regional banks have their own internal credit rating algorithms. Credit ratings from CRAs are generally consumed either in aggregates (a buyer on the secondary markets wants a traunch with an average credit rating of X) or by less sophisticated parties such as landlords.

> First is it does not account for people who have dropped out of participating in the labour market

There are alternative measures to U3 (the official unemployment rate). The U5 and U6 measures of unemployment are designed to capture discouraged workers.

That's because media people cannot do their jobs without Twitter. Since they have the megaphone, everyone hears about their gripes.

They probably don't know other languages.