dtwest

LA is not the densest metro area in the US. It is New York City by far.

But this comment got me curious, maybe I'm missing something. This article shows that LA is pretty close to NYC in terms of average density. But NYC is still more dense.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/10/americas-truly-denses...

I interpreted this particular article's main point as being:

Don't assume Japanese people are more honest than people in other countries, there are many social and cultural factors at play that influence behavior.

Generalizing a group of people is almost always inaccurate, and often frustrating to read, but I don't think this article is an egregious example of that. This is a fluff piece to get people interested in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, don't mistake it for serious cultural analysis.

How would one handle that many factors? I am very curious what the techniques for doing so would be.

I'm no expert but my initial reaction would be that you need more than 5834 adults in a study that controls for all of those factors. We don't really know how household size, for example, would affect the results, so wouldn't you need a bunch of test data to analyze all of the combinations? Or did they only study people who are the same in most of them? (i.e. 45, male, with a household size of 4, nonsmoking, etc...)

Would love to hear from someone more informed on this than myself.

This is a debate about language conventions, I can assure you that 0% of Americans claiming to be European in this sense actually think they live in Europe or are actual Europeans. There are some that speak the language and have exposure to the culture, but that is not what they are saying in this context.

In America, a nation of immigrants, people are often proud of where their family came from. This can trickle down a few generations. There is an increasing number of people that identify as "American" instead of where their family originally immigrated from, particularly in Appalachia and the South, so this could eventually change.

I understand the frustration from a European point of view, but I just wanted to provide some context to the phenomenon.

I thought this was a great comment until the petty jab at the end. Being concerned about this issue and being "disgusted at the idea of Chinese people learning science" are clearly different things. Don't let a few bad apples cloud your view of the rest of us.

It's just a typo in the first comment, they are talking about the same thing given the context.

For what it's worth, the cartoonist, Heng Kim Song, is Singaporean.

American coverage of India's space program has been very positive from what I have seen. If often includes praises of how cost effective it has been, and how wasteful the recent American efforts have been.

The US has meddled in European politics ever since the World Wars, and if they had not, you'd probably be a Russian.

The US has asked Germany to increase their own defense spending and provide symbolic support for a stupid war. But were there really any consequences when Germany said no? Those are not good examples of the US undermining European politics.

The article isn't talking about "huge financial details", whatever that might mean. It is about projecting information from alternative sources before the official numbers are released.

If it is ridiculous to compare drones to cars, it is also ridiculous to compare drones to kites. All three have different risk profiles. To have something that could weigh the same as a bowling ball fall on you is different than a kite on the end of a string. 55 pounds isn't tiny in this context.

That being said, cars are clearly the most dangerous of the three. But they are what we are most dependent on as well.

Exploit - to make full use of and derive benefit from.

You are interpreting the comment in the most negative way possible. The system needs to change, and we need to help these people in a different way.

Do you think it is good they are digging in the trash? Surely there is a better alternative to this. You may not like the wording but the parent is not wrong.

The idea is that if everyone plays by the free market rules, the average country will be better off.

If every country plays by these rules except one, which uses mercantilist tactics to win zero sum games, that one country will have an advantage.

If every country plays by mercantilist rules, that advantage will not be there for everyone, since now the game has changed.

China's "unprecedented" growth was achieved by Japan and Korea during their peak growth period. Britain was the original champion of liberalization while the US was protectionist for much of its history. The EU is still quite a bit richer than China and has done well during this liberal period since nearly destroying itself in WW2. There are so many details you are choosing to ignore.

I don't follow your logic, you're saying that if the human mind isn't computable, all our research of AI is a waste?

What if weak AI systems are extremely useful? What if we don't need to mimic the human mind to create intelligent systems? What if machine intelligence is very different than human intelligence?

We may never build a replica of a human brain. I think it would be absurdly lucky for the Turing model to be the correct one for understanding the human mind since it was developed without much knowledge of how the human mind works. But is that the only way for AI to be successful in your opinion? I don't understand that perspective.

Or maybe even earlier by Cicero. Seems like a common sentiment through history. Thanks for the link!

This reminded me of the Twain quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Sometimes I don't know how to solve my problems with tiny amounts of code. It often takes skill and effort to come up with an elegant solution. But I agree it is something we should try to do when we can.

Since you're talking about proper historical context, it should be mentioned that none of the "nations" you speak of of were nation states in the modern sense. Many of the local populations were experiencing theft from their local warlords or kings or emperors before the Europeans came. Human history is full of people abusing power, it certainly wasn't first introduced by the Europeans, and it isn't unique to colonial style oppression.

Anecdotally, I was diagnosed with asthma as a child and walked around with an inhaler for a few years. I liked it, it tasted funny and seemed like a cool gadget at the time. But I did not have asthma. And I'm convinced there's no way my parents would've been diagnosed with it 30 years ago with the minor symptoms I had.

So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to diagnose it. Just a thought.

I do not know the details, but it is my understanding that the Netherlands exports a large amount of its agricultural production. One could say, let's only produce what we need, and methane production will go down. However, if that was done, all of the countries that rely on the Netherlands for agricultural imports would need to increase production or find somewhere else that would. There is no guarantee that using country level caps will improve anything.

Unless I'm missing something, maybe it would be better to assign the emission penalty of a product to the consumer rather than the producer?

To be clear, my source is showing the spread, not the absolute cost to borrow.

I didn't say we are over, under or properly levered. If you are implying we are over-levered, go ahead, just provide some evidence. The evidence Washington Post provided is meaningless under closer examination.

Although I think we are in agreement that a normal spread does not imply future stability.

Both the article and the comments here are cringeworthy. I come to HN for the insightful comments, but for some reason, whenever finance is discussed, people do not look at data and start arguing about their feelings. This is a complex topic that requires careful analysis, unfortunately, the Washington Post has not spent the time to do this either.

I specifically want to point to this passage from the article:

"Last month, in its twice-yearly financial stability report, the Fed warned about the potential consequences of the market’s failure to police the rapid increase in risky corporate debt.

During the 2009 crisis, “BBB-rated” companies — the lowest rung of investment-grade — faced borrowing costs almost 7 percentage points higher than higher-quality companies. Today, the difference, or “spread,” is just 1.4 percentage points."

The way this is being framed is very dishonest reporting, 1.4% is close to normal, 7% is the highest it has ever been. A balanced discussion on the matter wouldn't get the same amount of clicks as fear mongering though.

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLC0A4CBBB

If you think the financial system is evil or incompetent, please suggest a better way of doing things or go into the specifics about what is wrong. As an example, saying "React is evil and everyone who uses it is stupid" is instantly recognized around here as a nonconstructive comment. Rephrasing it as "I like Vue better for reason a, b and c" is much better. Yet when things are finance related, this standard is not upheld.

Do you think China wasn't aware of how well the US had it? They had no intention of letting it stay that way. The US did not force them into it, they wanted to do this all along. Recent political action may have sped things up, but this has all been in the works for a long time.

That is true. That said, the French Communist Party and Stalin aren't exactly the same thing.

This is interesting. I wish there were more data points, they only show opinion in France in 1945, 1994 and 2004.

The USSR may have saved Europe from Germany, but the USA saved Western Europe from the USSR. The French in 1945 were likely aware of this.

Queens and Brooklyn can't get up to that level of density unless we build more transit lines. This is very difficult to do in NYC. Without additional lines, the city's road infrastructure would not be able to handle the additional traffic.

I think the author's point is to build more density along existing lines. Many stops in Queens and Brooklyn already have 3-5 storey development around them. Thus, build higher in those areas.

I agree that 3-5 storey development is a nice density for living in (I choose to myself). But practically speaking, spreading that zone wider in NYC, without any sort of transit plan, is not possible.

You might not like walking through it, but I think Long Island City is a success story for this model. Thousands of workers, who otherwise would've been driving up rent in Manhattan, decide to live near the LIC transit hub in high rises, and I think the city as a whole is better off because of it.

"It is a drug in the same sense that anything can cause addiction and withdrawal or be unhealthy.

Caffeine is, by itself, a drug in a different sense. It causes a slight addiction and can cause slight withdrawal."

This seems like a drug in the same sense, can you clarify?

Rather than making stuff up, here's dictionary definition of drug: a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.

As a user of both sugar and broccoli I can anecdotally attest that they do not have the same physiological effect on my body.

I had to comment, nobody in finance pays attention to the Dow. It's a meaningless index. Look into how it is constructed if you're curious as to why.

But to your point, it makes up 0.78% of the S&P500 which is not insignificant for sure.

China has a long history of war. The US doesn't even have a long history. Your historical view is zoomed in too far.

All large nation states are guilty of aggression, that's how you become a large nation state.

Most people saw what Twitter did and thought, Facebook is probably under some pressure to do the same.

Mark Zuckerburg saw it and thought, we now have a monopoly on social media based political advertising! $$$

That's my point. Saying engineering is the opposite of entropy doesn't make sense to me.