celtain

I don't understand how "replacing a manual process with an automated one provides positive value" is a controversial opinion on hacker news.

Doing work incorrectly is still doing work. The presence or absence of a failure state doesn't matter, what matters is the time and mental effort you have to expend.

It's not a lot of effort, but $1 also isn't a lot of money.

>On top of that the exercise of calculating the tip is beneficial for your long term mental acuity.

If you can honestly say that you think most people enjoy doing math, I don't know what to tell you.

I was halfway through your comment and getting ready to tell you about this great solution call PayByPhone that's used for parking all around my city. Thanks for that :)

However I would argue that charging sufficiently high prices for parking solves #1 too, the remaining difficulty would be finding cheap parking, not expensive parking.

Assuming you need to tip (and given that 97% of riders tip, it seems like you do), not having to calculate the amount is clearly a benefit. The author didn't just make up that $1 value, it's derived from the situations in which riders choose a custom tip instead of using a default option.

To the people who are "vaxxed and done", the pandemic-halting benefits seem to be real enough.

Many of us aren't done (and many others were done long before the vaccine came out), but we're not the subjects of this article.

This reminds me of people who say that "duck and cover" is useless in the face of a nuclear strike.

Obviously mitigations won't help if you're blasted in the face by an airburst (nuclear or biological), but it seems like it could still help if you're on the fringe of exposure.

You just said you're mostly done. If not the vaccine, what (mostly) ended the pandemic for you?

Why is there much difference between getting a booster every 6 months rather than every 12-24 months?

Compared to lockdowns or even just mask mandates, both booster schedules seem like a pretty minor inconvenience given the pandemic-halting benefits.

Perhaps students could use or even operate them. Undergraduate level electrical engineers would love to have access to a fab, even one a couple decades behind cutting edge.

There was a controversy, but the controversy was never over whether it was appropriate to ask for your honorific on a form, just what the options should be. E.g. nobody thought it was weird to ask if you went by Dr.

At least 99% of the people signing documents won't have a public key that anyone else can verify. Even if you help them generate one, they'll probably forget about it and you'll be the only one with a record of it, so once again we're left having to trust that you didn't tamper with your records.

You know the ERA hasn't been ratified, right?

So the alternative to making the bikes take a detour was that there would be more congestion, not that the road would be closed to cars entirely?

It sure doesn't sound like the "bike special interests" were the ones being unreasonable here.

To be clear though, that was a somewhat unusual race, e.g. the incumbent progressive Democrat probably would have won if he hadn't been knocked out in the primary.

The ex-Democrat, Obama/Clinton/Biden-voting Republican who won benefited greatly from the fact that her opponent had some pretty radical views, too radical even for Seattle.

Has the medical profession told you that your current housing situation cures a major ailment?

I don't think anybody is saying that the lack of windows is itself a good thing, even the "forced socializing" line of reasoning clearly uses the lack of windows as a stick to get people out of their rooms. It's just an acceptable tradeoff for a sizable subset of students.

>Which is great except 50% of people are introverts and need space to recharge. How many people live like this in real life?

The vast majority of students? I don't think I knew a single person who lived without roommates when I was a university student. Freshman year nearly everybody shared a room with 1-2 other people, this new dorm would provide far more privacy than that.

>We were trying to "flatten the curve"

Not were, are.

The entire lockdown/restriction/mask mandate set of policies has been based on managing hospital capacity. State and local governments are still using hospital capacity to decide when to lift or reimpose restrictions.

The wave of explainers we got last year about flattening the curve were wrong about how long it would take, but the fundamental strategy and the reasoning behind it never actually changed.

I'm not sure this is correct. People who avoid obesity-related health issues often just get old enough to suffer from some other, even more expensive disease.

A cancer patient requires more expensive care than a typical diabetic or heart disease patient, and the prolonged costs of caring for someone suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's can be greater still.

I'm not saying obesity is good for society (prolonging years of healthy life is a worthwhile goal on its own), but the impact on the healthcare system itself isn't necessarily so simple.

How is that analogy wrong? Both in terms of the technical implementation and the subjective user experience, you're making separate requests for a document each time.

Analogies are always going to be imperfect, but I can't see the argument that the "separate request" analogy is any worse than yours, let alone "wrong".

>there is an abundance of unskilled labor and the average person (the laborer) has to derive income from work. They can't just say, "Puh, this isn't worth it any more!"

This was true throughout the 2010s, but under full employment even a low-wage/"unskilled" worker can realistically go get a different job if they don't like the one they have. There's probably an Amazon warehouse nearby that would hire them at a higher wage, or a restaurant if they're willing to do a different kind of work.

My standard workday lunch used to be a chicken salad sandwich with all the toppings. When I replaced that with a mushroom melt I realized I didn't actually care that much about the chicken itself.

A lot of the meat I was consuming was just a matter of treating meat as the default option, not because it was actually adding significant value. That style of eating comprised at least 75%-90% of my meat consumption, and cutting that out turned out to be extremely easy.

The last 10%-25% has been much harder though, especially when my wife and most of my friends like eating meat so much.

Not all international disagreements are disagreements between sovereign nations themselves. It's possible that MAEU could sue JAXA or Hokkaido University in a Japanese court if they think they're violating Japanese law.

If that's not the case, or if the Diet passes a new law that protects their countrymen in this dispute, then yeah it becomes the type of conflict you describe.

Few people completely stop eating meat for health reasons these days. Even reducing red meat consumption is no longer considered particularly important for your health. It's almost always about the environmental and/or ethical issues surrounding the production of meat.

I love the taste of meat, so even though I want to reduce my carbon footprint I also want to keep eating burgers. Impossible burgers and other highly processed foods give me the best balance of those two competing desires.

If you were already spending >$200/mo on spin classes, the price of a peloton is very reasonable as an alternative.

>And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.

I suspect that if it was a lot more deadly, it would have triggered a stronger government response (at least in the U.S.) and ultimately killed fewer people.

Then again, I've repeatedly underestimated just how incompetent this administration could be.

I can see the value of letting people pay with time if they are less inclined to pay with money, but I wish we could let them pay by actually doing something useful with that time, rather than by having them waste it (and I don't think entertainment is a total waste of time).

I don't know of a good way to actually make that happen, and I'm not suggesting we should ban sales or anything like that, just that the current system wastes people's time and it would be better if it didn't.

My problem with sales is that time spent looking for sales is not at all socially beneficial, it's human labor that's completely wasted. If we want poorer people to have better access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should just give them more money.

Edit: In a way it reminds me of mining cryptocurrency. It's a system designed to reward people who can prove that they're wasting some other resource.

The Netherlands PPP conversion factor is less than 1, and was in 2009 as well. This means that each Euro spent by the Netherlands goes further than the exchange rate equivalent number of dollars would go in the US.

Wouldn't adjusting for PPP bring their healthcare spending up, not down, making Sanders less correct, not more?

Also, the superdelegates would not have voted for her if she had lost among the pledged delegates.

How can we know that? Because that's precisely what happened in 2008. Hillary had tons of superdelegates lined up behind her when the primaries started, but then Obama got more votes, so the superdelegates switched.