dbatten

How about this, then... I live in North Carolina. North Carolina is one of the 10 biggest states in the country (actually, #10, I think). 10 million people live here, consuming government services all day - healthcare, roads, parks, welfare checks, etc.

North Carolina's annual budget for providing all of those services is $23 billion - only twice the budget of the IRS.

Wow. That's larger than the budget of many US states... let that sink in for a minute.

Surely, you're not serious about this?

I work (in an office, not remote, mind you) at a tech company in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Most of the people I know also work in tech companies. In fact, outside of state government and the school systems, the major employers around here are all tech companies and research universities. You can easily have an entire career in tech, working in-person, in good jobs doing cool stuff. And the cost of living around here is a tiny fraction of what you'd pay in the SF/NY/LA/Seattle.

If you want to live in [big overpriced city] because you like said big overpriced city, feel free to do so. But HN really needs to get over this ridiculous idea that big, overpriced cities are the only place to have a tech career.

So, the media reports on rare, interesting things, not mundane everyday things? I'm shocked!

Your point is well made, but it's amusing that you use "proven phonics methods" as an example of something that's obviously the best way to learn something... Apparently, there's very heated debate on that subject. (News to me, as of a couple months ago.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-rea...

Undoubtedly... hence why I said "or ends up in a landfill if it can't be recycled."

I'm certain a lot of the stuff I put in a recycling bin doesn't get recycled. But I would be flabbergasted if it's being dumped in an ocean...

Where does all this come from?

I'm admittedly not the biggest saint on the sustainable living front, but I also don't see how all of this is getting into the oceans? AFAIK, any plastic that comes into my house either ends up in the recycling (where it's presumably recycled or sent to the landfill if it can't be recycled), ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) or (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling. Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.

It's easy to blame others for this sort of stuff (and, as I already said, I admit I could do more on this stuff). But I can't help but think that first world countries with relatively advanced recycling/trash systems aren't contributing much to this and can't do much about it by implementing additional regulations...

Am I wrong about that?

Obvious corollary: if you're lucky enough to love doing something useful that most people would hate, you're likely well situated to get paid a lot for doing that thing.

If you eat something that even remotely resembles a healthy diet, you probably don't have micro-nutrient problems anyway. You might be obese, but you're getting your vitamins.

I used to wonder if I should take a daily multi-vitamin. For unrelated reasons (weight loss), I started tracking my food intake in MyFitnessPal. MFP reports on calories, macros, and micro-nutrients... and I was shocked to see that my regular, reasonably healthy (I'm not a health food enthusiast, but I don't just eat big macs either) diet gave me way more than 100% of my recommended daily allowance of pretty much all the vitamins and minerals tracked in MFP.

Serious question(s) from a father of 2 under 2...

How do you get the cloth diapers clean? Like, really clean so they don't still smell after they've been cleaned?

My wife and I were planning on cloth diapering. We bought some high-end cloth diaper and liners and started on our merry way. We found that no matter what we did, our little guy smelled like piss all the time. My wife was washing diapers 2 or 3 times in between wearings, "stripping" them to remove remaining smells, etc., etc.

Our water bill went up by literally $50 a month, we were buying all kinds of detergents to try and get the smells to go away, and we had already invested a ton of money actually buying diapers in the first place. Not to mention that my wife was spending all her time washing, re-washing, and folding diapers _and_ our kid still smelled like piss.

In our case, disposables were a god-send. The little dude is happy, he doesn't smell, my wife doesn't spend half her day cleaning diapers, and (especially since we buy diapers in bulk on good sales), we've found disposable diapers to actually be far _cheaper_ than what we were paying for water, detergent, startup costs, etc. on cloth.

I would never go back, just because of the time savings alone.

Came here to ask if this was a zero sum game (verbatim, actually). So, thanks for this.

Given how much human conflict has erupted over access to rivers and other water sources, I can't imagine it will go well if a lot of countries start to do this at scale...

It's also fascinating how we muck-up water management in seemingly contradictory ways. I live in a temperate climate with a good amount of rainfall, but my town is already jockeying with its neighbors for the last remaining access points on the local water reservoir. Meanwhile, every time we get a heavy downpour, local creeks overflow due to excessive runoff from parking lots and what not and end up flooding all kinds of places (the local mall floods pretty much once every year or two, it seems). Fascinating how we can have not enough fresh water and too much fresh water all at the same time.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Not quite. Labor force participation counts those that are employed or _want_ to be employed...

Commenting on wrong post maybe?

For anybody scrolling through... the Lockharts Lament link is worth the read!

Yes and no. It's not insane from Facebook's perspective. If you're wasting money on Facebook ads, why would they want to give you a tool that helps you figure it out?

What mystifies me is that people haven't demanded more of this. People spend literally billions on online ads, with very little ability to validate whether it accomplishes anything. The fact that they haven't been screaming for rigorous experimental trials of ads for years blows me away.

Facebook now offers the ability to run rigorous controlled experiments on your advertising spending - you basically randomly divide your audience into treatment and control, run an advertising campaign that only the treatment group can see, and compare purchasing behavior between the groups.

On the basis of several experiments with this, I can assure you that advertising does not always work, even if you track the treatment group for months after they were exposed to ads.

I think the author's bigger point is that a lot of the purpose of advertising basically boils down to increasing brand recognition. That's fair, but not anywhere near as novel of an observation as he thinks it is. His assertion that the majority of advertisers don't understand awareness and brand recognition is laughable - they understand it very well, and consistently run campaigns to achieve it.

Not sure if submitting my own blog is discouraged on here, but I'm hoping to get the word out and get this shut down.

This is particularly true for things like soda. Soda does absolutely nothing to help you feel full, but it's pretty calorie dense due to the sugar. Cut out added sugars (and therefore soda) and BOOM, you're immediately eating less calories but not feeling any more hungry.

> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.

Heck, I'd settle for tax reforms that didn't give large corporations that can afford an army of tax accountants/lawyers and a host of offshore shell corporations an advantage over small corporations that can't afford those things. You don't even need to get into giving advantages to startups to begin with, just stop hamstringing them by making them compete against folks that can sidestep the tax code.

Again, what do you mean by that? Most (all?) Facebook ads already state which business page they're associated with. (I'm admittedly not on Facebook, but I have trafficked some ads for work.)

If you're asserting that Facebook should say who's REALLY behind by the ads, you're basically asking for Facebook to hire a crack team of private investigators. Should they be responsible for figuring out that Nice Ad Buyers LLC is really a wholly-owned subsidiary of some other corporation, which some neo-nazi millionaire owns the controlling stake of?

What do you mean by that? Filtering billions of posts, trying to figure out which ones are "real news" vs. "fake news," and which ones come from well-meaning vs. nefarious actors, AND doing so in a way that is not only politically neutral but also perceived as politically neutral is a MASSIVELY non-trivial problem.

Even if you think the social networks should be trying to solve this problem (and some would argue that it's a hornets nest they would do well to avoid), acting as if they're being negligent or incompetent because they haven't figured it out already is a bit unfair.

Can someone change hacking in title to interfering with?

Does anybody have any insight into the "reading wars," why phonics has fallen out of favor, and why it might still be important in certain contexts? All of this intrigued me in the interview and I was very disappointed that none of it was explained.

Biannual is fine.

I think you're confusing biannual and biennial. Biannual and semiannual both mean twice a year. Biennial means every other year.

Yep. Plus pretty much everything at the airport.

It would be interesting if security forces were all aware of this and used it anyway... You'd have an effect on criminals who assumed it worked, plus it makes for great security theater.

Unrelated to the content of the story, but interesting nonetheless...

While reading the article (which was low quality with a flawed attention-grabbing headline, as others have pointed out), I noticed 3 consecutive articles linked on the right side were for porn-related stories. I don't know too much about the International Business Times, but the name would have made me think it was a relatively upstanding news source. Plus, the .co.uk always adds a bit of extra class for us Americans.

So, I looked the place up on Wikipedia[1]. Here's what I found...

"In late 2011, Google allegedly moved the outlet's articles down in search results in response to excessive search engine optimization activity."

"Reporting in 2014, Mother Jones claimed that IBT journalists are subject to constant demand to produce clickbait; one former employee reportedly complained that management issued 'impossible' demands, including a minimum of 10,000 hits per article, and fired those who couldn't deliver."

And it goes on...

So, yep, pretty much a click-bait factory. No wonder the story is so mangled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Business_Times

It's further concerning that he appears to have written his own example code for the speculative dark patterns, presenting it alongside real code from insurer websites, which I found misleading at best and downright deceptive at worst...

I don't disagree with you that "fake news" started out as a reference to a very specific phenomenon... it's just interesting that the term very quickly became a political cudgel. I think the transition from useful, specific term to political weapon is part of what makes it an intriguing study in how terms disseminate in culture. It's like "disruptive" - a highly specific term referencing a very particular business strategy that got abused to mean just about anything people wanted as it had its moment of popularity.

I also sympathize with your frustration with politics being framed as left/right. I consider myself pretty libertarian, so I often find myself raging against that divide. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that as a matter of practical reality, politics in this country is framed that way, and that shapes how terms are used, how arguments are made, and how things are portrayed in the media...

Additional observation: it's also interesting to me that the term seems to be having a resurgence of late?

It started out largely being an accusatory term used by the American political left to disparage biased and/or incorrect information spread by Trump supporters (mostly, anyway). But then Trump and his supporters decided two could play at that game, and it became almost exclusively a term used by the Trump/Fox News crowd to bash the left.

As a result, the left stopped using it as quickly as they had started, and the term all but disappeared from respectable news sources.

Now, a year and change later, it seems to be coming back.

No point here other than it's fascinating how trends in culture stop, start, and change with time.