injb

The gist of it seems to be this:

>>> Requiring the use of CRS for children under two would significantly increase the price of family air travel for a small targeted population • Price affects consumer decisions • Would cause some families to divert to the highways, a much higher risk mode of transportation. • For every child under two saved by a regulation (1 every ten years), a minimum of 60 lives would be lost on the highways.

I didn't read the whole thing. I'm not sure how they think they know this is what would happen.

Thanks, that is a good read! I had a similar thought earlier today while listening to a podcast about UFOs: the photos of mysteriously phenomena are always going to be blurry because that's what makes them mysterious. Better cameras cannot change that fact.

Though I had assumed that this "tautological blurriness" would become less common as cameras get better, but you have correctly pointed out that it won't because previously invisible things will now be upgraded from invisible to blurry and mysterious.

I'm not sure how specific an answer you're looking for. But I would say the options now are the same as they were before the layoffs. I think the layoffs were a reshuffling of resources as far as software developers are concerned. That is to say, I doubt that there are fewer job opportunities than before. They're just in different companies.

Well I might have worded it a bit flippantly. I didn't mean to flabbergast anyone!

But I don't think what I'm saying is that far from what's commonly accepted. Mutually assured destruction is the widely accepted doctrine. What I'm saying is I think it's mutually assured near destruction with a bias in favor of the US. I think this because of a combination of (a) how much each country can lose and still exist as a country; (b) how well their defenses will likely work (c) how many other nuclear countries will take their side etc.

That is just my very unscientific impression.

By "everyone knows it" what I really mean is it's hard for me to imagine how any other world leader could think that they are going to be the last one standing. Absent a massive shift in the balance of military spending, technology and many other things, the US remains the clear safe bet imo.

Why do you think this might be more likely? Would you wait to see if the other side is going to nuke another one of your cities?.

I could see it starting that way. One side gambles that they can nuke one city and the enemy will deescalate to avoid a full exchange. But the other side is compelled to respond in kind, knowing that they can't sit and do nothing, and hoping that that a one-for-one exchange will be the end of it. And it might be. But if not, then it must be an all-out exchange imo.

Think about it like this: someone punches you. You punch back. If they do nothing, then that's the end of it (for now). But if they do it again - are you going to stand there all day exchanging punches? You now know that they're determined to keep hitting you. Your best chance is to throw everything you have at them right now. That minimizes the damage to you. That's clearly true if you're stronger than them. But if you think about, it it's equally true if you're weaker.

FWIW, I think everyone should stop worrying about nuclear war. The US would win hands down and everyone knows it.

B2B, online, recurring rev.

Yes I only found one company doing what I had in mind. But I had to dig a bit to even find them.

In truth I don't have the faintest idea how much revenue they're getting but I can do some leg work to get an estimate. The founders both seem to be involved in other things and I suspect it is a "let's see where this goes" kind of side project for them.

I think this is a really good point. When I was younger, I would probably have told myself that they haven't been successful because they're not smart enough or didn't try hard enough. Now I've been around the block and I think more like they way you're suggesting.

Great questions, thanks. They are all things I've been asking myself. 1: I think it's valuable, yes. 2: yes it's very rare as far as I can tell.

3 & 4, that's hard to answer but I think that every startup faces that problem. Yet, someone usually wins.

5: I don't have ideas I think are good very often, so until I think of a better one I'm not really sacrificing any big opportunities. And I kind of feel I'm more likely to discover better ideas if I start working on something. So you might have made me answer my own question by asking that!

>>> Why do your options all assume humans have figured out this technology?

They don't. I didn't specify who figured it out. It could have been aliens.

Thanks. Just to clarify, I wasn't looking for this to use. I was looking to build it for other people, to solve a fairly well known problem.

It's one of those things that needs a critical mass to really work well, like a social network (though its not a social network)

I've said before here that aliens as a hypotheses have little to no explanatory power. What I mean is that if you accept that people have witnessed this marvellous tech then either

(a) it's possible and someone has figured out how to do it, OR

(b) it's possible and someone has figured out how to do it and aliens exist

Don't get me wrong, I get it: the argument is that if someone on earth had figured it out then we'd simply have to know about it, thus it must have come from somewhere else.

It's just that I think that no matter how hard it is to believe that someone on earth could have invented this and kept it a secret, its still more plausible than aliens.

For anyone who has trouble with this, let me ask you to consider this: what if it's not that advanced? What if it just appears that way?

I claim that if someone has figured out a way to draw shapes in the sky that have no mass and move them around at will, then that is enough to explain most of it. Can I explain how they would do that? No. But is is less likely to you than aliens?

>>> And this is India, a democratic country," Mr Dorsey told the show's hosts

I'm alarmed at how often I'm hearing this sentiment from apparently smart people, i.e. "...but this is a democracy". I have been hearing it enough lately that it's starting to look like people think the word "democracy" refers to a kind of enlightened state with some sort of guarantees of fairness or justice.

Democracy literally means majority rule, that's all. Why would anyone expect that to result in fairness?

If you want guarantees of fairness and justice then you need something else as well (like a set of guaranteed baseline rights, an independent judicial body to uphold them etc.)

>>> Having the cheapest possible flights is not a civilization goal we should be aspiring to

But everyone does have the same body type. They are just not all the same size. What you're saying is basically that people who are disadvantaged by their size should be given priority over those who are disadvantaged by being poor.

I would like to live in a world where people who are unusually big because of genetics or a genuine disability or medical condition or whatever can have the same experience as everyone else at the same price. And if that was truly the cause, we wouldn't be hearing about this. Airlines would just eat the cost and avoid the controversy. We're hearing about this because it's a massive epidemic in the West, brought on by lifestyle, and the airlines can't afford to assume that overweightness is an anomaly any longer.

>>> But it’s not as if someone is getting up in the morning and making a decision that they’re going to be a large person

This fallacy is a big problem with people claiming that various negative things in life are "not choices". The idea is that if you can't bring it about by "waking up one morning and deciding to be xxx" then it's not a choice.

This is plainly untrue. Many situations take a series of bad choices to bring about, and a corresponding series of good choices to fix. The fact that you can't simply decide get into a given situation instantly or decide to get out of it instantly doesn't mean that it's not a choice.

I don't know about the stats used in the article, but I agree with the gist of it: stats only tell you the chances of a statistically average person being killed, but that isn't very useful or insightful because of the enormous range in people's behavior and attitude to safety.

People don't understand this basic fact about averages: you throw away most of the information! If you want to talk about the chances of dying in a plane crash, then these kinds of stats are ideal, because everyone who flies has about the same chance, and there's nothing you can do to change it.

But with motorbikes, you can influence your chances of surviving. And not just a little bit! When I started I remember reading that something like almost half of fatal motorcycle accidents in the US don't involve another vehicle. Incredible! Literally almost none of those people need to die - they are dying because they go too fast, don't wear proper safety gear, refuse to use their brakes, and/or they never explicitly learned how to control a bike. All choices.

There's a major caveat to all that though: yes you might behave better than many other motorcyclists, but it takes discipline. That's why bad behavior is so popular (it's easy). How much to you trust yourself to never make a mistake? So yes it is dangerous but you do have a lot of control but extra-but also you will probably have the occasional lapse in that control.

Rather than dangerous, the word I tend to use for motorcycles, small aircraft, bad neighborhoods etc. is unforgiving.

>>> He continued. “Okay, that’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth.

That power must come in handy, to be able to just "see" when people are telling the truth! Or is his superpower really that he can make anything true, just by deeming it to be "clearly true". I hereby deem cold fusion to be the clear truth!

With respect, the height of the bar to getting what you want is your problem, not mine. The gist of your post seems to be that your right to what you want is a forgone conclusion and if you don't see a way to get it legally, then I have to find some other way for you to get it.

The truth is that if you can't persuade me to give you what you want and the law is not on your side, then you don't get to have it. And that really is the end of it. That's what it means to live under the rule of law.

It's a good thing that repealing the 2A is nigh on impossible as far as I'm concerned. I don't see it as an obstacle. I see it as part of the bedrock of the American social contract.

>>> But also, has ar-15 violence fine up significantly? I believe most deaths are still from pistols.

I don't think it means much either way. I expect an increase in the use of AR-15s in crime for the same reason I expect an increase in the use of white cars in bank robberies: there are more of them now. In Ireland we used to see news stories a lot about how "the Glock" was "the gangsters weapon on choice", "favored by criminals" etc. Why? That's what was available to criminals. Why? Because that's what gun owners preferred generally, so there were more of them around.

So yes we might see an increase in the use of ARs in crime but that doesn't mean that there's any meaningful link between the choice of guns and the crime. And while they have advantages over pistols in terms of firepower, that rarely matters in the kind of incidents that most people are worried about (like a shooter being locked in a classroom full of children for example).

As a huge supporter of the 2nd Amendment, I'm glad you posted this and I hope it doesn't get flagged. I could hardly disagree with you more than I do, but it's nice to see someone acknowledge that they just don't agree with the law and would like to see it changed as opposed to looking for ways to maintain that the law is something other than it is (which everyone on all sides of pretty much every major debate has been doing, not just guns).

>>> So it looked like a bad idea to most people. But to few, it seemed obvious. Should they try it, or should they project their thoughts onto others and pass because if it's obvious, no point doing it?

If I understand the advice correctly, then it's clearly the former: if they find it obvious, but they know that others don't, then that's a strong signal that it might be a good idea because this combination is a rare characteristic that good ideas need to have.

>>>And they tried it because they ignored this very advice you're reading right now!"

This assumes that what's obvious now was obvious before, when it was first implemented. Actually that's central to the theme of Taleb's book The Black Swan: once something has been established it's very hard to think of it as being anything other than obvious. But the first time, it looked like a bad idea to most people.

>>> Same with business... It it makes sense, it will fail because odds are the idea has already been tried. Silent evidence.

I seem to recall a PG essay where that was essentially the main argument.

So you are saying your i140 can be pending indefinitely?

That's to become a permanent resident, not renew a H1B. You cannot renew a H1B indefinitely.

Thanks!

What are the correct numbers?

That makes sense to me. Now that I think about it there are a lot of mathematicians in the US doing maths in English who learned in some other language, and you never hear complaints about limitations of English. But I think the thrust of the article linked here was "are there ways it could be easier for children" rather than "are there ways it could be easier for grad students and professors". I'm not sure the answer to the first question is "yes" but it seems plausible at least.

I must disagree. There are many examples of mathematical concepts that are much harder to learn than they need to be due to bad choices of names.

One we have discussed here on HN many times is the names of "real" and "imaginary" numbers which not only fail to shed any light on the things being studied but are positively misleading. There are plenty of other cases, from the many overloaded meanings of "multiplication" to things like open and closed sets (where a set can be one, or both or neither)

Therefore since it's clear that maths could be significantly easier even in English if we just improved the terminology, it follows that it might already be that easy (or even easier still) in some other language.

It might be a universal language, but there's only one way to get it into your head and that is by getting information in a language you already speak. And while all human languages may be equivalent, the words and phrases that have been fixed for explaining maths concepts do not have to be equivalent.

The employer has to prove that they have tried and failed to hire a US worker qualified and willing to do the job for the prevailing wage. The complication is that some people think the existence of the H1B affects the prevailing wage, and the system is therefore skewed.

>>> The only entity in the US that wanted and continues to lobby for H1B to continue is industry and their sole reason for doing so is keeping their salary expenses as low as possible. In the software industry it began with the fake premise that there was a shortage of qualified labor. Without a loophole like H1B, when a labor shortage occurs, you have to raise wages to attract people to the profession. With H1B, average wages (not FAANG) have been allowed to stagnate because the visa workers come from countries with a lower cost of living. I'm all for immigration, but not sure it's humane to tie it to a profession - if someone is allowed to become a citizen because of their profession, are they not allowed to give it up and do something else in the future?

Some quick googling indicates there are around 65K H1Bs issued every year, and around 4.4 million software developers. So even assuming that most of those H1Bs go to software developers (they certainly don't all go there) it's still hard to imagine this having a serious detrimental effect on salaries, although I agree it's probably an incentive for the few companies that actually get H1B workers.

BTW, to answer your second question, yes if you become a US citizen you can generally abandon the career that led to your getting whatever visa you had before. In fact you can do that long before you become a citizen. You can do it once you have a green card, which in most of these cases is a minimum of 5 years before they become a citizen.

For most H1Bs it's going to be something like 3-6 years on the H1B during which time you're basically "indentured", followed by 5-6 years on a greencard, during which time you can do whatever you like for a living as long as you don't do anything that suggests your H1B sponsor was lying, followed citizenship.