chmod600

Some zero-price schools in the US, like high schools, have essentially no standards at all. You can get a diploma even if nearly illiterate.

Good schools with high standards can be delivered with or without paid tuition, and the same for bad schools with no standards.

Institutions on a small scale a long time ago are not easily comparable to institutions means to serve a much larger fraction of a much larger population.

A nearly content-free article. The idea is not new, and little data is offered to support it.

The success criteria seems to be "enrollment", which leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong. No downsides are mentioned aside from cost, which is dismissed with a tax that sounds like free money.

Chemically speaking, how is natural rubber different from plastic while still having such similar properties?

What gas does it sublimate into?

Well, maybe or maybe not. A lot of the negative thoughts I have are somewhat fleeting, and if I revisit them the next day they seem pretty trivial and I could probably dismiss them sooner.

Others might be more meaningful, perhaps a character flaw that you don't want to think about, but without really processing it it will never get fixed and keep causing more problems.

It's much easier and faster to pass a law with loopholes that still removes 90%+ of the bad stuff you want to remove.

If you try to solve 100% of the problem you have the bad stuff on the market for another 10 years while the details are sorted out.

Or you just ignore the details and ram through the bill, and find out about a lot of unintended consequences and have a mess.

Ideally, politicians would pass the bill with loopholes first, and then follow up and try to close them to finish solving the problem. But that's one of those things like refactoring and code cleanup that you always mean to do and never get around to.

A few tangential questions:

Assuming services are available and accessible on a voluntary basis, what is the success rate for overcoming major substance abuse or mental health issues?

How does that success rate change with various levels of coercion?

Assuming the success rate is fairly low, that still leaves a lot of people with substance abuse or mental health problems. What is the right thing to do for them? Independent housing is one option but wouldn't some kind of institution make more sense?

If someone's main problem is homelessness and some minor criminal behavior, I can imagine that free housing could turn their situation around quickly. But only if it's a safe environment around similarly-situated people.

Not sure if it's true or not but the author is suggesting that the housing is not a safe environment and that they don't have good access (or at least utilization) of services.

I read it more as an argument that it's an expensive way to keep the homelessness out of sight.

(Not agreeing or disagreeing, just my interpretation of the author's general point.)

It seems like the suggestion (by implication) is mandatory treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues.

There's always some way to group things together, but I find it unhelpful in this case.

Even grouping all firearm deaths together is almost always unhelpful. Ordinary violent crime with firearms is very different from a school shooting is very different from suicide by firearm.

Then grouping firearm deaths together with a highly addictive and slow-killing vice like cigarettes just adds to the confusion.

Is this just a final battle for the remaining scraps of money in a dying industry? Or is this a real, substantive negotiation that will push the industry to a better place?

If you observe an action that's wrong, you can work backwards from there to discover what you need.

If you have to use dragnet searches, that means you don't have any clear bad action to work from, and you're trying to construct it from statements.

In your analogy, you assume that you already know a murder happened, and it's a question of who did it. Obviously words matter there.

But for antitrust it's using words to try to show that a crime even happened at all.

That's definitely weirder -- more like if Tom said he killed Fred, but we don't really know who Fred is or whether he is alive or not, and we still put Tom on trial using a series of his statements.

That would be interesting to discuss but it's not where I was going and it's a bit off topic.

Investigations should start with the crime and work backwards to find the criminal. If you have to find incriminating statements to tell if a crime has even happened, that is really a different thing.

We've shifted too much in the direction of punishing based on words rather than actions.

Punishments should be driven primarily from actions and harms, and words should just be used to show intent and involvement.

It seems weird to me that the question of whether company X did something wrong is answered by its own employees' statements (based on their narrow perspective) rather than some objective criteria that something bad happened.

The links you provided are about copyright and trademark law, not patents.

Counterfactual:

What if debts were all perfectly organized? If you miss a payment, the collector would email you an electronic copy of the contract, and the parts in breach would be highlighted. Further assume that the contract itself is simple and understandable, and the debtors knew they were in breach of fairly obvious clauses (e.g. send this payment by this date). And let's also assume all collectors act in good faith and warn you of upcoming obligations.

And then let's say there was an efficient and fair legal process, and if the debtor still doesn't pay for an extended time, it would be economical to sue individual debtors, and get judgements, and enforce them as prescribed by law.

Is that better?

My guess is probably not. Small debts are in a weird optional world and if you don't pay the main problem is that you have trouble borrowing more, or need to borrow at bad rates (maybe check cashing instead of formal credit). The collectors are some weird outgrowth of this model, and they don't really serve any useful purpose. But it might be better than actually enforcing small debts against people as the current laws allow.

Of course, ideally, we'd just be honest and call it an optional system. To be in good standing with lenders, pay your debts. If you don't care, then don't, and maybe be locked out of borrowing in the future. And larger debts would be handled separately, with collateral, etc.

Aren't the shares worthless anyway? The company is bust, right?

What's expensive about having a lot of threads/processes? Could those costs be brought down somehow? Would it help to configure the threads as they are starting (e.g. start a tiny thread)?

Maybe it will be a compromise where the roads have special markers that are easy for machines to process.

Moderation is not censorship.

Moderation is for forums where readers have little control over who is posting the content that you are seeing, so the forum tries to shape the content for the readers in one way or another. Examples: Reddit, HN, trending or boosted social media posts.

Censorship is when the reader elects to get information from a known source, and someone or something intervenes to prevent the information from arriving. Examples: twitter blocking content from a source whose readers elected to follow them, filtering emails from known contacts, filtering private messages.

For AI, it might depend on the specificity of the question whether it's more like moderation or more like censorship.

The recent surge in violence as DAs have stopped fully prosecuting criminals -- including those who commit violent gun crimes -- has blurred the line between criminal violence and state violence. That renews the argument for self defense.

In other words, as the state declines to protect you, you have a better claim on the natural right to protect yourself.

What other fish do you recommend?

We are talking about something on the order of a week here. Are you suggesting that survival-level us-vs-them greed will take hold in that timeframe?

That sounds like a fun project if you are a bitcoin millionaire that moved to a ranch. Rip the components out and try to re-engineer all of the control systems.

Given the number of sensors, it could also be a great way to collect open data for farming innovation, environmental data, etc.

Lack of free speech is a vulnerability, and is not really important until it is.

There was a campaign by Democrats in the US about "misinformation" and all kinds of solutions were being proposed.

It culminated in the Disinformation Governance Board: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/29/disinform...

How weird to make this a fight against hypocrisy.

If X causes Y, and you like Y, then it might boost your support for X. But if not, that doesn't make you a hypocrite. I mean, what if X is a bad thing for other reasons?

Why not just say "remote work increases fertility" and let people judge for themselves?

Plastic straws strewn in a natural setting feels a lot worse than sand. I can't tell you exactly why, but I still think that "don't throw plastic around" is a good starting place for a discussion and I don't think it's productive to argue that point.