gameman144

Reducing waste is a great option! I'm not of the opinion that raising taxes is some objectively correct solution or anything, my personal viewpoint is just that taxing more across the board to invest in infrastructure and long-term economic strengths is the way to go.

What I don't get is how this could possibly pass constitutional muster. If this ban is permissible, what's to stop any speech platform from being banned on security grounds?

> Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.

I agree that tax rates should be higher, but I have absolutely no faith that politicians will do a better job stewarding money toward good causes than a billionaire who cares about them (and/or wants to brag about their philanthropy for clout)

It's always fair to criticize, but it's also very plausible that Carnegie paid for buildings instead of books so that his charity would improve things for the longer term.

Also, as long as the outcomes are good, I personally don't care one iota whether a person is doing them for the wrong reasons.

> The whole point of a democracy is that the people are the priority

This is not the point of democracy. The point of democracy is that the priorities of the people are the priority.

For instance, it is entirely possible to have a democracy that agrees that we should perform human sacrifice once a month, so long as the majority of its constituents agree that that's their priority.

Democracy provides a vehicle for a populace to enshrine their values into law. It does not define those values (such as valuing human flourishing or freedom of choice), that's up to us to build on top of it.

Wait, do we want to live in that kind of democracy? Literally the whole reason that I love democracy is it lets the people set the rules, then gets out of the way and lets people do their thing.

I could not disagree more strongly with the notion that democracy should be the mechanism by which businesses should be run.

Democracy says which choices we're okay with, but businesses and people should totally have the autonomy to decide which of the allowed choices to go with.

Is every computation worth memoizing? I can think of very few computations I do that others would care about, and in those cases there's already a much more efficient caching layer fronting the data anyway.

> I don't care that some people round here squirm when the C word is criticised

I am probably one of the staunchest defenders of capitalism, but I totally agree with your stance here.

Capitalism is a really really good mechanism for optimizing for outcomes through competition. A huge majority of problems can be solved well by competition, but for those problems that can't be, rules and governance are absolutely critical.

For instance, contracting out maintenance of the Washington monument to the best-suited firm makes total sense as a competitive market. Deciding whether we want the Washington monument to exist or not is not something that capitalism or a competitive market is best suited to answer.

The wacky thing is that we don't even need to totally discard intellectual property publication rights here -- the New York Times had plenty of exclusive interviews they publish which I can access for free the next day at the library. The government has the unique right to say "Yep, you retain the rights to this publication, but we're giving access to it for free", and to do that by dictum if necessary.

Are boom/bust cycles unique to capitalism? China is going through a pretty big bust and is hardly a capitalist role model.

As a general rule, "if you don't like this rule we're adding, don't take advantage of it" is a pretty terrible argument. It's absolutely fair to say that a rule shouldn't be implemented while also acknowledging that if it is, it is the best strategy to take advantage of it if it is.

For instance, imagine if the NFL decided to give up to two extra points after a touchdown for how stylishly the players celebrated, as voted by a panel of judges in the end zone. This would be a terrible addition in most people's eyes. If it went through anyway, though, you can bet that every team would start dancing their hearts out after each touchdown.

The total amount of money being the same doesn't imply that there would be no inflation. The total demand being the same (for a given supply) would be what you'd need there.

If you give the rich more money, they're not likely to spend it on restaurants and merchandise and services: they can already afford as much of those as they want.

If you give money to people who couldn't afford them without the extra cash, though, you're artificially boosting demand, which would impact inflation.

Agreed, I'm not arguing that video game addiction is good -- it's not. I'm saying that if a parent doesn't have the ability to enforce rules (whether by lack of ability, or because they're too busy supporting the family, or any other reason), then a child breaking the rules to play video games is much better than them breaking the rules in other more destructive ways.

Yeah, I get that completely. In those cases, video games are a comparatively harmless thing for children with no supervision to opt into.

Interesting, I'm super opposed to that! Parents who are able to exercise some control over their children's activities already enforce these limits, and parents who can't could do far worse than kids playing video games.

What would you imagine an appropriate reward for such efforts would be, other than intrinsic ones?

I think one distinction is that subscriptions often denote "I like your work, keep doing that", whereas one-off payments denote "I liked this one thing, I'll pay you for it"

The former can be assumed to be a lot more sustainable than the second.

This is an interesting definition to me. Any library is going up make implementation-specific assumptions, so unless you're using a library that's purely an interface that multiple implementations conform to (e.g. SQL, and even then not fully) then there's necessarily going to be some migration work when switching libraries.

One really cool mechanism I didn't see listed there (at least directly) was riboswitches. Essentially, a segment of mRNA with a binding site for a molecule. Ribosomes that are transcribing the RNA will then branch into two separate flows depending on whether the molecule is bound or not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riboswitch

Wasn't the whole victory there because cigarettes/vapes can't be sold to minors?

It seems really hard to define a firm line between making an addictive product and making a product that people really use a lot because it's well-made.

For instance, I play a lot of video games. If their developers got punished for getting me so hooked, that would be a real slap in the face to everyone involved.

As far as I can tell, the CDC is also stating an is-a relationship:

> an initialism is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters

Wait, am I crazy or are these two articles saying the exact opposite thing about which class is the parent one?

The CDC one seems to say that initialisms are a class of acronym, but the Writers Digest one says acronyms are a class of initialism.

Did anything actually force the issue though? The comment said that they closed the other six doors, but I don't see any implication that people pushed back in any way that improved the new two-door situation.

> This is just being cheap and rather foolish.

If preferring not to give an additional $60k as a tip is considered cheap, then call me Mr. Scrooge.

In this calendar system, though, the third Saturday in September would always be the same day of the week, so it would keep you from celebrating in that format.

This is a pretty strong take. I'd be curious whether you believe that education is inherently indoctrination, or whether all current education approaches are just also indoctrinating?

I disagree on both counts, but it seems like the claims there are pretty different in how extreme they are.

I agree that that's the hope. One also has to consider, though, that instead of transitioning from homeless to housed, the infusion of money might transition some folks from homeless to homeless with a budget to fuel addictions.

If the goal is to reduce the rate of negative outcomes for youth aging out of foster care, though, aren't the ones with mental health or addiction problems exactly the ones who would need help the most?

Your linked article doesn't propose that the earning potential of college graduates isn't higher, it just states that people think the tuition price might not be worth it.

College educated adults absolutely have a substantially higher earning potential on average.

Isn't that expected since 'y' is still non-const though? In your example, I'd expect 'x' to not escape, since a const-cast of it is undefined.

The analogy here isn't quite the same though: you can pledge allegiance, but you aren't required to. A bill saying that you are now required would be a change in obligations, and patriotic citizens might still oppose that.

This bill, however, is proscriptive: it is saying that you cannot perform an action. It's a hard case to say that we shouldn't put that restriction into law while also believing that discrimination should be restricted.