hyeonwho4

Was $10k before or after the insurance negotiated discount? Pre-discount prices mean nothing: I had the same tests ordered twice (needed the results urgently), once through my PCP/HMO and once paid to a walk-in doctor's office in cash. The cash price was $700. My PCP claimed a price of insurance $3500, who then negotiated it down to a "discounted" $710. So the worst of both worlds would have been a high deductible plan.

There use to be "Raccoon cafes" in Seoul. You go buy a drink and pet the raccoons. IIRC animal cafes were banned around 2019 or so.

Looks like IoT devices are the next frontier in residential proxies ... or provide spies the next leading indicator into SV business performance.

I don't know. I don't think that most Asian apartments have central fresh air. Usually the unit owners open windows regularly.

Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y

This is called an FCU (fan coil unit) and is common in Asia. It consists of a high efficiency central chiller run by building management, and pipes to bring coolant to each unit. Then in each unit there is a heat exchange coil with a fan to blow the room air through the coil. Hence fan coil unit.

The advantages of this system are that the only sound in the unit is the fan, and air is not circulated between units. The disadvantage is that building management can turn off A/C centrally if they want to save money.

For some reason Americans are slow to pick up HVAC innovations that are common elsewhere: heat pumps, split-system air conditioners, FCU, etc. I guess it is because energy is cheap to them and they don't mind noise.

The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)

The default setting on ChatGPT is to now include previous conversations as context. I disabled memories, but this new feature was enabled when I checked the settings.

That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."

The unfettered computer and internet access was a desktop machine (which needed to run a minimalist distro) on dial-up in a very public room. The fun that taught me tech stuff was getting to distro to work, and there was no privacy. Parents were much more aware of the dangers back then.

Nowdays everythibg on smartphones "just works", and the OS won't even let the user access system files. I meet college students who have no idea what a file system is, or what a DNS server is.

Times have changed, indeed.

When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.

This kind of "smuggling" or failure to declare live specimens is very common in biological research on. This is the third time I've heard of international collaborations playing fast and loose with the law. (The other two were finding ways to send live samples by mail.)

Compromising and using empathy to understand the opposition's views so that you can negotiate for what you need does not satisfy the base, and does not satisfy social media. The (naive) game theory of negotiation says that it is better to stake out an extreme position so that you get more of what you want when you negotiate it away. And the dynamic of primary elections also allows traitors or traders to be punished if they defy the desires of the party too much.

That is true. What recently happened is that the Supreme court has determined that speech which benefits a foreign terrorist organization constitutes "material support" to that organization, and providing material support to a terrorist organization is a crime which can get a green card revoked.

Now, I don't think it makes any sense that speech is "material" support, but I also think it doesn't make any sense that speech is "violence," and US culture seems to have repudiated my thoughts on what distinguishes speech from action.

But whatever I think, under current law, speech in support of a terrorist organization is no longer free speech. And certain pro-Palestinian organizations were defined by the previous administration to be terrorist organizations back in November. So it follows that certain pro-Gaza activism is no longer free speech. I don't think this should be the case, but this is the current state of the law.

ICMJE guidelines are frequently cited by other publishers, with the caveat that it depends based on the field. (Which makes sense. A "substantial contribution" to the LIGO collaboration might be much less direct than one in ML or field geology.)

> Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

> Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND

> Final approval of the version to be published; AND

> Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

So you are right. The corresponding author who got funding for the postdoc who designed the experiment for the graduate student that supervised undergradutes and wrote the paper would have a pretty tenuous commection to authorship.

But good luck to everyone else in that chain publishing without them.

Ref: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-respo...

I'm surprised this was published now, given that I saw a talk on this at a math conference in either 2008 or 2009. The memorable anecdote was that they filmed children who worked with cash in the market, brought them to the classroom, and given pen and paper in the classroom they would be unable to duplicate the calculations they had already done in the market. The speaker was promoting VR to simulate the market context in the classroom.

I guess what this paper adds is a higher N and the reverse case, that classroom skills don't transfer to the market.

I agree that free healthy food for all kids is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have very little trust in US school administrators and school districts to provide healthy meals which nourish children instead of food industry espoused slop which sets them up with an unhealthy eating habits for life.

Here's a comparison of school meals in Korea vs. the US. There are similar comparisons with Japan, France, and Germany. Somehow the US is uniquely unable to feed kids healthy food. I blame political corruption and food industry marketing.

https://www.allkpop.com/buzz/2024/04/what-are-they-feeding-t...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/how-french-s...

Yes.

Personality tests being useful makes sense, but personality tests where candidates are sparse and the training/hiring bottleneck has already been passed by candidates is terrible.

Also, I have a very hard time believing these "correct" answers are representative of the already hired candidates. Worst subject in school was science, worst in college was history, and participated in four or more high school sports, but no correlation on whether they believe it is important to be fast or accurate in their work? Applied to five or six jobs in the last three years? Is bothered "more than most" by criticism from others? [1] I almost find it easier to believe that they were blatantly playing into negative stereotypes of certain minority demographics than that this survey was fit to describe already hired ATCs.

[1] https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

I went skiing in Korea during the next to last weekend of Feb 2020. Best skiing of my time there, because the mountain was already empty of people due to public concern. By that time we were already wearing N95 masks: I remember discovering it was very hard to talk with both a ski mask and an N95 on.

By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.

Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662

I agree with you that Chinese rural poverty is probably improving faster, but I'm not sure that rural poverty has been "steadily getting worse" in the US as you claim. This [1] page with data from the census bureau make it look like rural poverty goes in waves, with the recent local maximum in 2013 about half of the initial 1959 measurement.

But this is all confounded by definitions. China defines poverty to be an income of $2.30 per day, which corresponds to purchasing power parity of less than $9 per day in the US [2].

I wasn't exaggerating about emaciation: bones were visible.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP?locations=CN

I haven't been to China since 2019, but it is pretty obvious that median quality of life is higher in the US. In China, as soon as you get out of Beijing-Shanghai-Guangdong cities you start seeing deep poverty, people in tiny apartments that are falling apart, eating meals in restaurants that are falling apart, and the truly poor are emaciated. Rural quality of life is much higher in the US.

There were two definitions of Critical Race Theory. In 2021, the National Education Association adopted a Business Item [1] to "Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) -- what it is and what it is not; [...] and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members."

This included "Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project." [1]

Which is pretty wild, because that's a great summary of everything conservatives were objecting to in social studies classes, and provides a good wording for Christopher Rufo's redefinition of CRT.

However, I agree with you that this was a very recent redefinition of the term Critical Race Theory: As far as I can tell, the application of legal scholarship's CRT to education scholarship in the late 1990s was focused on the Critical analysis of teaching outcomes [2, 3, 4], especially racial discrimination in school districts. This seems to have been focused on administrative things rather than course content. There was a subsequent movement around 2016 to bring "Critical Race Praxis" into school districts, which again seems to be focused on removing inequities from school administration and teaching counter-narratives to "K-12 leaders". So I think that this is where conservatives found the term and decided to repurpose it to label the antiracist content which was being incorporated into social studies courses.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210705234008/https://ra.nea.or...

[2] https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/22/02/state-critica...

[3] https://thrive.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/Just%20what%2...

[4] https://ed.fullerton.edu/lift/_resources/pdfs/multicultural_...

[5] https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Envisioning-a-Critical-R...

> The only ones that come to mind are good, actually

It's funny you say that, because my impression is that DEI allows companies to avoid criticism of their oppressive policies with token investments in a few diverse staff.

- Running sweatshops in SEA [1]? "NIKE, Inc. is building more equitable and inclusive practices to empower our employees and create the workforce of the future." [2]

- Repeated oil spills in Nigeria? [3][4] Shell's vision is to become "a place where everyone—from employees, to our customers, partners and suppliers—feels valued, respected and has a strong sense of belonging." [5]

- Exploiting unaccompanied, undocumented children in factories that make Cheerios? [6] General Mills is "committed to advancing our culture of inclusion, equity and belonging for our people, business and communities." [7] They are also happy to look the other way when their subcontractor Hearthside Food Solutions hires children to work in their factories, as long as they have plausible deniability.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_sweatshops [2] https://about.nike.com/en/impact/focus-areas/diversity-equit... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/25/africa/shell-oil-spills-niger... [4] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/12/21/timeline-oil-s... [5] https://www.shell.com/who-we-are/diversity-equity-and-inclus... [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-... https://archive.is/1sDWO [7] https://www.generalmills.com/how-we-make-it/putting-people-f...

I hope that's enough to reveal that a lot of these so-called DEI initiatives are only there to performatively assuage investors and activists, while the companies involved continue preying on the marginalized.

> we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage

1. Who cares? Those colleges are private entities and presumably this admissions discrimination means they cannot receive Federalor state funds. If admitting gay students goes against their religious beliefs, then the rest of us benefit from having the people they reject.

2. It is not up to us to tell other families who they can and can't marry, or what they can or can't think. Let the bigots be bigots in their bigoted bubble, as long as they don't hurt anyone outside it. (If their children wish to leave the bubble, we should protect and support them privately.)

3. A cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl is homicide, independent of anyone's beliefs.

It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.

To be fair to pg, he has hinted at anti-radical-left beliefs before (see the essay about moral fashions). He is probably able to voice anti-radical-left views now because the Overton Window has shifted.

That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".

Thanks. I understand this a lot more now that I've learned about venvs, and I'm between VScode and emacs for editing. No longer would I install a editor which depends on the same environment as the code I want to run.

As for Spyder, it is included in the default Windows install of Anaconda (and linked to by the default Anaconda Navigator). As a new user doing package management via the GUI, it was not clear at all that Spyder was sharing dependencies with my project until things started breaking.

Anaconda was also half-baked in other ways: it broke if the Windows username contains UTF-8 characters, so I ended up creating a new Windows user just for that ML work. PITA.

This is not just a pip problem. I had the problem with anaconda a few years ago where upgrading the built in editor (spyder?) pulled versions of packages which broke my ML code, or made dependencies impossible to reconsile. It was a mess, wasting hours of time. Since then I use one pip venv for each project and just never update dependencies.