9,179 karma · joined November 13, 2013
A good sentence can be a bad headline.
It's the same principle as Murphy's Law in engineering. If it can be interpreted in a different way, you don't put it at the top of your story.
In this case, removing the word "alone" makes a better headline.
If we use every measurement device humanity has at its disposal, and find no difference, it is safe to conclude that the visible effects of reiki have no discernable cause of action beyond the placebo effect--which can be reliably generated by putting sufficient flimflammery in your bunkum.
If there is a difference, it should be measurable. And repeatably measurable using standardized testing devices with SI-derived units. If there is a genuine effect that can only be measured by its effect on biology, then obviously one should be able to build a measurement tool using biological cells. If reiki is real, it can be explained, one question at a time.
To be clear, factors other than physical force can also influence gene expression.
Cats don't have owners; they have servants.
Repeat with photovoltaic cells, microphones, night-vision sensors, capacitative sensors, inductive sensors, magnetism sensors, etc.
My hypothesis is that reiki is 100% placebo effect, no difference will ever be measured between otherwise identical reiki and non-reiki movements, and the most effective investigation of reiki would be measuring the brain states of patients who think they are receiving treatments.
Activating the placebo effect is good. If we can study it enough, we might even be able to do it without any bunkum.
To that trope of "four boxes" (soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammunition box) we might add "burner box", for the computer that was purchased with cash and kept off all of one's usual networks.
It's one of the quirks of the modal ethics of the computer person that we'd rather get someone fired, ruin their credit, reassign 20000 orphaned traffic/parking tickets to their name, or send a SWAT team to their home address, than to dirty our own hands with actual blood. You have to account for that in any organized resistance strategy. Nobody around here is going to be beating up scabs.
Robocalls shove someone else's voice into your ear, without offering you an ear in return. They signal a synchronous communication, and then reneg on that promise with a spammed asynchronous message.
"Political speech" is the same as every other kind of speech. There should be no exemptions for policy just because someone running for office is involved. They have the same duty of courtesy as everyone else, and we have the same right to block our ears from their spam messages as businesses and scams.
For instance, there is a chicken virus (SMAM-1) that unconditionally increases adiposity in the infected bird, even when the chicken is fed the same amount as inunfected chickens. SMAM-1 is zoonotic to humans. It also makes them fat. Several human adenoviruses are suspected of doing similar things. But they have not been studied extensively, because the general prejudice is that people become morbidly obese due to their own lifestyle choices, and therefore excessive adiposity is a condition that should be first-treated with lifestyle intervention, rather than applying evidence-based medicine.
There are still a lot of nonscientific prejudices in general medicine. "Let's sequence all viruses in our patients," sounds a whole lot like "let's wash our hands before touching a new patient, so we don't spread diseases between them," which was once rejected by the experts as implausible hogwash.
Or the counter-fire is protected by a C-RAM system like Phalanx, Iron Dome, MANTIS, or Porcupine/DRACO.
Every counter has a counter. It's turtles all the way down.
Even so, there were still a lot of attempts made at overcoming an obstacle, using normal logic, that failed because they required a joke punchline instead, such as... finding a straw in a needle stack.
Modern I.F. games are a lot better in that respect, because you can code in a half-dozen solutions for the same puzzle, without creating new voice and graphic resources for all those alternate solutions.
This is where all those hours of listening to drummers drone on and on about the metallurgical qualities of cymbal brass--and the audible differences between Paiste, Sabian, and Zildjian--can come in handy.
Better containment would have given countries some extra time to bring any mothballed reserve healthcare capacity to ready status, but I think this was essentially unpreventable. Absent any evidence of actual intent to spread a virulent disease worldwide, other countries don't really have any grounds to be angry at China, just for having 1/5 of all possible first-infected people, and getting the unlucky draw this time.
This one likely came from one bat contacting one human in Wuhan. The next one could come from Chennai, or Kinshasa, or Lagos, or London, or Dubai, or Chicago--any place that has humans living in it. Unfortunately, scapegoat culture exists worldwide. Bad news historically has had an abysmal track record with respect to retaliation against messengers, whistle-blowers, and bystanders. As long as someone can get punished for a disaster happening on their watch, the containable screw-ups will continue to be covered up. If the cover-up fails, the person organizing it probably would have been punished anyway.
Did someone in China attempt a cover-up? Maybe. Is that all of China's fault, as a nation? Only insofar as China's government, like many other governments with worldwide political influence, has a secrecy culture within it that punishes uncontrolled release of information that is damaging, or even just embarrassing, to the state.
Let's throw this revelation onto the pile for the post-mortem analysis, after the pandemic threat has lessened, to learn a lesson from it. That will likely take the form of a UN resolution, that will probably be vetoed. None of the major powers will want to reduce their ability to crack down on leakers and whistle-blowers. There is no solution I can formulate now that is compatible with large nationalistic governments existing on this planet.
I think you'd line up all the buy orders by descending price, and line up all the sell orders by ascending price. Then there are three possibilities: the buy orders are exhausted, the sell orders are exhausted, or there are enough of each that their prices cross an equilibrium point.
In the latter case, you set the price at the crossing point, and clear all trades that you can at that price.
If the buys are exhausted, you set the price at the sell which clear it. And if the sells are exhausted, you set the price at the buy that will clear it.
It would, under such a system, be advantageous to always have some buys or sells put in that you don't expect to clear, but would produce profitable trades in case of sudden market moves in your favor.
In the past, that function would have been filled by the "market maker" trader.
Restricting routine trips to just home-to-work, work-to-home, and large-scale resupply missions is still acceptable at the moment. Make use of your local grocery's picker service with delivery to the parking lot, if you can.
Consider switching your dining-out trips to ordering via phone, fax, or electronic ordering system, and doing drive-through, carry-out, or parking-lot pickup. Pay electronically, in advance, instead of handling cash at the point-of-sale terminal. If you get cabin fever, and need to socialize, do it through screens.
It is essential for Starbucks to serve customers in order for them to stay in business. You don't have to stop going. But you can put in your order via website or app; walk into the retail location only when it's ready; pick it up without speaking to, breathing on, or touching anyone; and then leave immediately. It is possible to minimize the duration and intensity of contact, without eliminating it entirely.
It is better to be in contact with your regular friends, acquaintances, and business associates--that are all the same people every day--than to have a lot of transient contacts with complete strangers. It is slower to traverse a social network one connection at a time than to hit a lot of random, unconnected people all at once with a brodcast.
Governments, and their public health employees in particular, should be switching to management, mitigation, triage, and treatment now. The assumption is that everybody will get it. The goal now is to ensure that a person occupying an ICU beds will be treated and recovered by the time the next patient needs to be admitted into it.
Issuing more extensive travel bans now are driving in the rear-view mirror instead of keeping eyes on the road ahead. It's already here, and spreading in the community.
First priority is viable testing. You can't manage what you can't detect.
Then it's like controlling a nuclear chain reaction with irregularly-shaped fuel in a randomly-configured reactor. You want to eventually consume all the dangerously radioactive fuel, but you don't want a runaway reaction and core meltdown either. So you stick control rods and moderator fluids and neutron reflectors in as needed to control the rate of the reaction, based on your monitoring, and just keep doing it until all the unreacted fuel is gone. And the whole time, people are dropping dead from the radiation. But then the reaction finally burns itself out, and you can breathe easy again, then reflect upon your failures to revise your plans for the next one.
The federal response has already failed. Now is the time for lots of smart people, who can adapt quickly, to implement ad hoc measures at the local level, based on local conditions, and draw on their public health emergency budgets, that hopefully weren't cut or raided already, and their preparedness efforts, that hopefully actually exist.
It's far more likely that those financial geniuses are just not worried about retirement or college tuition for their kids. Because the strongest correlating factor for getting richer is already being rich, and not being smart with money.
The real question is... why aren't all yachts now gold-plated yachts? If my father gave me $1 billion 40 years ago, I would have to be literally the dumbest idiot in the world--or the unluckiest schliemazel in the world--to have less than that now. Instead, I just got a debt-free bachelor's degree, and so I'm not rich now, but still doing okay.
I don't think it's wise to judge based on the peaks and bottoms. Those are the outliers. The price touched there for a fleeting moment and then backed away. I'd rather calculate a trend-line over a long timespan that covers multiple boom-bust cycles, and note when the price crosses it. When the price is below the line, that's a relatively better time to be buying, if you have spare cash, and when it's above the line, that's a relatively better time to be selling, if you have the stocks.
You'll drive yourself crazy trying to predict the optimal timing for large orders.
Putting in a little at a time, or taking out a little at a time, based on broad criteria and your own goals as an investor, is way better than intensive analysis or day-trading. Once a paycheck or once a month is fine. Even better if you can set it up to be automatic, and you don't have to think about it too much.
Unfortunately, I don't have any spare cash, but those who heeded the warning of inverted yield and switched from "gradually buy" to "gradually sell" back then probably have enough cash savings and downward movement to switch back, or to at least stop selling for a while.
If the virus has spread to 0.1% of the population (330k cases), an auditorium with 693 people in it has a 50% chance of having at least one infected person in it.
If the virus has spread to 1% of the population (3.3M cases), a cafeteria with 69 people in it has a 50% chance of having an infected person.
If the virus has spread to 10% of the population (33M cases), a house or office with 7 people in it has a 50% chance of having an infected person.
If the virus has spread to 50% of the population (165M cases), a fortified secret bunker with 1 person in it has a 50% chance of having an infected person.
But if that bunker dweller hunkered down back when the spread was only at 0.01%, not only would they have less chance of being infected themselves, they would also not be potentially spreading it to others. So it pays to start limiting contacts earlier.
I imagine a function using things like transmission vector diffusion rate, windspeed, incubation period, critical care percentage, number of ICU beds, and such as parameters, and outputs the maximum allowable gathering size that will keep the spread slow enough that everyone who requires hospital recovery can get admitted. Public officials could then ban public gatherings greater than 80% of that number.
Seems like a paper describing it could be worth some academia brownie points.
That prestige problem is especially dire with medical colleges in the US. The patient community (aka everybody) desires more numerous, cheaper, and better-distributed physicians, but the physician community desires higher-paying positions that are more costly to fill, with a remuneration premium for working in less desirable territories. So only some hospitals are teaching hospitals, and their residency programs have limited slots. (I think the Army/VA system could possibly break that cartel, by ordering qualified recruits that sign up for a longer term of service to become physicians, and routing their medical training outside of the civilian system. It would certainly drop ER visit prices when those stabilization specialists and trauma surgeons get their 20 and start to "retire" out to civilian jobs.)
If universities are going to order students and faculty to leave campus, they are removing a huge piece of their competitive advantage over universities that already have mature distance-learning programs, but with lower tuition. If MIT takes its campus off the table, the thing they have left is their brand name. That's enough to sustain them, specifically, but there aren't many other universities that could get away with it. The one just up Massachusetts Avenue, maybe, and a handful of others. And they still have to pay for grounds and facilities upkeep, even if they aren't using them as much.
Any other distance learning program could probably hire 1 remote adjunct for every 10-15 remote students and outdo "two sections of lecture hall plus office hours" tenured professors that have a 1:300 ratio. They can use some of the savings for cheap test proctors at distributed--and possibly also shared--evaluation sites. If every surplus Ph.D. can get a part-time remote teaching-support gig for 20 hours a week at $25/hour, they can still keep working the jobs they already have, that don't require their advanced degrees, because their graduate universities did not restrict Ph.D. output to just what the industry could bear.
A degree from MIT might open more interview doors, but there is less difference in switching between schools like Rose-Hulman and Georgia Tech. If campus location is no longer a factor, any student could study at any school. Schools that want to survive under such competition would have to bring down costs, fast.
Remote students and remote adjuncts--what do you need administrators for? Ah, yes, to collect the tuition, attend the luncheons, and issue the credentials.
It would at least put a small dent in the oversupply of Ph.D. holders in some fields.
But as things are, the relative effort to terraform Venus, compared with Mars, is absolutely colossal. It essentially requires a full-blown robotic asteroid mining industry, wherein olivine asteroids are diverted directly to Venus, and magnesium and calcium are mined, sent to Jupiter to produce saturated hydrides, and those sent on to Venus. It will take 1000 years, minimum.
Mars can get realistic results within 200 years, just by diverting water-ice comets and managing temperature.
That is, develop general AI with a sense of responsibility and filial duty to its parent species, and which won't turn us all into paper clips.
If you say "sand the floor", a contractor that shows up with a power sander and sands the floor is still a contractor.
When Mr. Miyagi kicks away the power sander, reveals two sanding blocks, and says, "No, like this," then Daniel-san is his employee.
If the job is "clean my house on Wednesday no earlier than 8 am and finished by noon, without using bleach", as long as the only thing you're managing is to check the cleanliness of the house at 12:01 on Wednesday, that's still contracting. If you are then surprised that your cleaner subcontracted with the Cat in the Hat, and a Seussian steam-engine rolls in at 11:50 and back out at 11:59, leaving everything spotless and sparkling, you'd best just keep your mouth shut and enjoy the cleanliness. Because if you concern yourself with the who and the how, instead of just the what, where, and when, you should have hired an employee.
If you can't hand off the job to another equally qualified person and still get the money yourself, that's not contracting.
In the metaphor, the "apiarists" should probably have some contracts for honey with queen bees, who then manage their own hives in their own way to make delivery. But then those queens would have negotiating power, and the ability to switch apiarists to get the best price for their honey.