dpatru

Your article says that Duke University is shutting down research because the government is cutting overhead allocation from 61% to 15%.

The posted article was about research to cure blindness with stem cells. The top comment implied that such research was being defunded.

I asked for an example that was not about defunding research on transgender mice. The only examples provided were for research that was confused with transgender research.

So it seems that Doge is not cutting research for curing blindness and the like but only for transgender and some related-sounding other studies that were lumped in together, which will probably be sorted out in time.

A decade ago I read this same advice in "The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law": spend at least a little time trying to solve the problem before you look to how other's have solved it. One benefit is that occasionally you may stumble on a better method. But the more common benefits is that it helps develop your problem-solving skills and it primes you to understand and appreciate existing solutions.

The side that uses government power to censor its opponents should automatically be suspect.

Tech Ingredients has also worked on this: https://youtu.be/dNs_kNilSjk?si=WDhGBmNsUdkm8Qgj

President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program [1] where used cars in good condition were destroyed to increase sales of new cars seems to have been based on the broken window fallacy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

This is like complaining of unequal vehicles at an airport: A relatively few can fly very fast and hold hundreds of passengers, but most are earthbound-bound and can carry only a few passengers. Of course Silicon Valley has inequality: it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth. Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor, just like crippling airliners will not improve the cars in airports parking lots.

No doubt the BBC has its flaws, but you take allies where you can find them. If you care about the truth, it’s important to call out government censorship. The foreign press is more likely to reveal unpleasant truths.

> Punishment by process is a favourite tactic of the Modi administration when it wants to intimidate or wear out those who dare to find fault with the prime minister or his party. In 2020 Amnesty International was forced to close its India operation after its bank accounts were frozen. Last year Oxfam India and the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi, suffered tax raids. Indian media outfits, journalists and activists who have offended suffer worse. Reprisals, whether carried out by the government or its enraged admirers, have included pulled advertising, detentions without trial and, for Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and critic of chauvinistic Hindutva ideology, assassination.

I read this article after posting one [1] on the muzzling of Seymour Herst’s revelation of how America blew up the Nordstream pipelines. Politicians of every country love to use state power to silence their critics. In America, the preferred method is currently to work through the media companies. [2]

[1] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/ron-unz/banning-seymour-...

[2] https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/remarks/twitter-and-202...

To the extent that writing is like playing an instrument, one should try writing simply before trying to be stylish or entertaining. And for many purposes, simple writing is enough.

The cabin’s webpage is here: https://zumthorferienhaeuser.ch/m/en/homes/oberhus

It shows the floor plan.

It seems to me that at the implementation stage, the things that never change and the things that do change are the same. For example, customers will always want low prices and fast delivery. Internet ordering and robots in warehouses are things that change. But the changes are better ways to fulfill the unchanging needs. So Bezos sees investments in internet ordering and robots as investments in what does not change. Whereas Andreessen sees the same investments as betting on change. So what difference does their point of view make if both entrepreneurs end up making the same investments?

A mistake that I've made before, that I think is quite common, is to assume government will enforce laws the way I would. Regarding speech, because I am a person of good will, tolerance, and open-mindedness, I assume government will enforce the law this way. This is a grave mistake. The people who would seek out jobs in which they can control other people's speech are exactly the sort of people who should not be given that power.

Even if the actual enforcers of speech law were honest, they would never be allowed to enforce the law where it is most needed, namely government itself. Wars are usually supported with lies. [1] [2] Will speech laws be used to punish government officials who lie the country into war? I think not. Instead, such laws will be used to protect powerful people, especially people in government. For example, in Citizen's United, a case that Democrats still criticize, the government was prosecuting the members of a small non-profit with felonies for publishing a 90-minute documentary critical of then Senator Hillary Clinton. [3]

[1] https://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/07/15/damned-lies-nine-w... [2] https://www.europereloaded.com/false-flags-and-the-american-... [3] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205

Not all abdominal surgeries have opaque pricing. An appendectomy at Surgery Center of Oklahoma is $7,368, paid in advance. https://surgerycenterok.com/pricing-disclaimer/

For decades computers and related technology have been dropping in price. Yet people still buy and the industry is one of the most prosperous in the economy.

> It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it. They did hide away the error messages, but they didn't provide help and insight.

> If they had done so, you'd have (presumably) been told in the software that there was a problem with certain albums, and been walked through a flow that would fix said problem. Or maybe a link to a support page that'd do the same. This, if it was done, would have been much better than showing "error 0xFHJAD1234".

The parent post addresses this: there are so many ways for for the system to fail that it’s not feasible to “inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit”. So where an error is not gracefully handled, the system should allow for a human to see the error and solve the problem, rather than throw away the error.

>> Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant or both. But since you've eliminated engineers from the design loop (see #1 above), no one will tell you you're full of it.

1. You may be overestimating the time you save. Eating out may take more time than cooking and cleaning up when you factor in travel and waiting. A bowl of cereal, hot or cold, takes less than a minute to prepare and maybe a minute to clean up. Our family eats oatmeal most every morning. We use an instant pot: one cup of dried oats, two cups of water, put the lid on and press the porridge button. The instant pot beeps when it’s done. Washing up takes seconds with a brush and soapy water. It’s hard to imagine that eating out would be faster.

My brother makes big, hearty salads by mixing vegetables with canned corn and beans. Prep time and cleanup take less than 10 minutes.

Rice is very fast to prepare in a rice cooker. A topping of beans can come from a can.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are very quick to prepare.

There are many cold foods that are quick to make. Hot foods can also be fast especially if you use heaters that automatically turn themselves off so that they don’t have to be tended, e.g., rice cooker, instant pot, microwave, toaster.

2. Cooking yourself is probably far healthier that eating out. Your health is worth something.

3. The discipline and initiative it takes to plan and prepare meals yourself will likely help you in other areas of life, similar to making your bed, keeping a clean and tidy house, good grooming, regular exercise.

The fact that the US intelligence services were undermining Trump was obvious to anyone paying attention to headlines. Here is a specific example: the FBI submitted a false affidavit to the FISA court so that they could spy on Carter Page, https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/17/politics/fisa-court-slams..., and through Page probably the President, since a wiretap allows listening on other people up to two hops away. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/485072-was-president...

Biden’s mental decline is obvious. See for example https://nypost.com/2021/12/03/joe-bidens-made-up-stories-and..., https://youtu.be/9ssNav3MnBg.

The most significant aspect of “government” surveillance is that whoever controls the surveillance also controls the government. It was clear that Trump was not in control of the surveillance state: it was working against him. Biden does not seem to have this problem, but he seems deeply compromised, https://www.foxnews.com/media/hunter-biden-scandal-cnn-msnbc..., and, because of his mental condition, it’s clear he’s not the real executive who’s running the country.

I get a runny nose if I get cold. Same for my children. From an energy perspective, this make sense. If the body is expending more energy trying to get warm or not get cold, it may not have the necessary energy to fight off germs.

Also, the immune system works better hot, aka fever. Cooling the body can be expected to suppress the immune system.

Before you dismiss proverbs (old wives’ tales), consider that they could persist because they’re true.

Thanks for posting this. It’s a beautiful house. I’m sorry for all the negativity.

The natural state of man is poverty. It is trade and specialization, division of labor, that allows people to have enough to eat, be comfortable, and have some time in which to do things other than trying to survive.

The prosperous homesteaders on YouTube make their money off of YouTube.

I would view a comfortable life in the country as a luxury. You finance the luxury with a lucrative, specialized job/business that only takes a small portion of your time.

George W. Bush famously liked to spend time on his ranch with a chainsaw clearing brush. Clearing brush, like blacksmithing, woodworking, fly fishing or homesteading, can be a fun way to spend time. But generally these are luxuries that have to be financed with work. Bush could not have survived by trading in his job or business for clearing brush.

The money for a missile could be given to the population, but then it would not go to the missile’s manufacturer. But the whole point of the war is to give money to arms makers. They are the only ones who benefit from the war and who lobby for it.

Doctors can normally be sued just like anyone else. They carry liability insurance. Vaccine makers are the only ones who been able to get immunity.

If the vaccine is safe, then its manufacturer and providers should not need protection from suits. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/12/16/cov...

The manufacturers are telling the FDA that their vaccines are safe enough to mandate while at the same time they tell Congress that their vaccines are too dangerous to make unless they get legal immunity. Safe enough to make billions in profits; too dangerous to have to defend themselves in court against people they injure.

As shown both in the article and in the comments, scientific establishment seems content to tolerate fraud. But when research goes against big money interests, suddenly standards become very strict. See how Andrew Wakefield was treated. https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452

The value of bitcoin is that it is a money with a fixed supply. A gold-backed government currency is approximately the same and would render bitcoin unnecessary. Yet no government is willing to issue currency that is convertible to gold on demand. Why? Because of greed. People with control over currencies want to be able to make money at will, unconstrained by the necessity to produce value or even to persuade citizens to pay higher taxes.

The electricity costs of bitcoin is the cost of countering government officials who insist on maintaining the power to inflate their currencies. The cost is analogous to the cost of freedom-seeking citizens of a despotic government. Enormous resources are used up in North Korea as the government seeks to control and restrain its population and some individuals seek to resist and escape. One could blame this cost on the Dear Leader who seeks to impose his will on the population or on the selfish individuals who resist him. It depends on your point of view.

The US has not fought wars to prop up the dollar. Instead, the strong dollar has enabled the US has been able to pay for its wars by inflation. Had the government been forced to directly tax its citizens to pay for the wars, the wars would not have appeared "cost-free" to the citizens and would have been opposed more.

As bitcoin becomes more popular and stable, it's "appreciation" relative the fiat currencies will reveal how much value governments are secretly stealing through inflation.

Before you criticize bitcoin you should understand the problem it is solving. Bitcoin is a technological solution to a government-created problem: the creation of money from nothing because politicians and government leaders want to spend more than they can collect in taxes.

Other solutions to this problem include owning gold and stocks, both of which are also costly, but in ways that are harder to quantify.

If you want to avoid the waste caused by government money printing, lobby your government to stop confiscating wealth by allowing gold-backed money and reducing taxes.

Consider this in context: No ban for fighting the wars in Iraq, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. No ban for torturing people or extraordinary rendition. No ban for mass illegal spying on Americans and lying about it. No ban for droning wedding parties or hospitals. But if you dare to suggest that a political party, that cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination and spent the last four years lying about how Trump, the only living President who hasn't started a new war, was a Russian agent, may have had something to do with a "coup" attempt which could only benefit them politically, then you are too dangerous and must be banned.