nelaboras

Sorry for not being more clear, I meant Langer's classic study. A critical/write-up here:

https://www.coyneoftherealm.com/2014/11/05/re-examining-elle...

Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group. To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded.

Someone else already pointed out that this is actually quite significant, just the time might have been too short but there is clear indication something is there.

For me the key question is: what is the key ingredient (or the right mix of ingredients)? E.g. is it having a programme to follow (having aims/duties is known to increase longevity, see the famous 'plant study')? Or rhythmic fluid movements (so like tai chi or qi gong or yoga)? Or the combination with music (multimodal stimulation)? Or the social component of dancing (so e.g. encouraging proximity like mutual hair brushing, engagement that encourages touch, etc)?

Fascinating and raises many new questions. But it's clear the most deadly thing is probably inactivity.

Free will has a lot of different interpretations.

For personal life I find this one the most practical: if you have the impression that you have free will then you have free will. Even if your choices are in fact determined rather than choices, the fact that you think you're choosing makes the determination irrelevant.

Judicially the argument goes exactly the other way: unless we have proof for free will any punishment (for possibly predetermined decisions) is unjust. The justice system then only serves three possible functions: 1) keep dangerous people away from society 2) act as a deterrent, a factor that goes into any predetermined decisions and 3) to help rehabilitation, help the individual make better choices.

The justice system eg in Norway very much fits these schemes, while common people still see prison etc as punishment the actual judicial decisions much more aim at rehabilitation.

There are even stories of amazon selling fake books... Their way of acquiring themselves and of course intermingling goods makes the whole of amazon hard to trust.

In Europe a number of companies (most notably shoe company Birkenstock) are refusing to sell on amazon due to them mixing fake and real products and the producer gets the losses AND takes the commercial and reputational hit when things go wrong.

EU bank cards will mostly allow free withdrawals across Europe (with some strange exceptions). Some countries like Belgium have fully prohibited national banks from charging customers of rival banks. It's not a technical/financial issue, it's a policy choice...

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...

This seems very odd. These sites add features over time when new patterns are discovered, so I'd doubt that they delete any parts not used today because they might be useful in the future...

I pay taxes

Taxes go to FBI/Europol etc

Security services pay these shady data brokers with my taxes to access data

Shady data broker buys hacked data from criminals with my taxes

Cybercriminals live off my taxes.

Cybercriminals hack more sites, selling/leaking my data.

I don't know whether the ends justifies the means here, but it seems really off that our security apparatus pays money to maintain a criminal ecosystem. On the other hand once the data is available it would also be wrong not to use it to catch pedophiles, mafia members, tax evaders, ...

Not data per she but an official point of critique by the EU

>

The business environment is improving, but strengthening Italy’s public administration, justice system and anti-corruption framework remains a challenge. The digitisation of public services is progressing. Further efforts are needed to improve public employment, especially at management level. Weak administrative capacity is diminishing the public administration’s ability to invest and carry out policy or enforcement tasks that affect businesses such as market surveillance. In this regard, a comprehensive strategy to strengthen it is missing. Inefficiencies in public procurement also remain often unaddressed. Despite recent improvements, the length of civil trials remains among the highest in the EU. Recent reforms are starting to bear fruit and an enabling law to streamline the civil procedure is under discussion. However, to reduce trial length, there is still ample room to ensure more efficient management of cases and limit unfounded appeals. The anti-corruption framework was strengthened recently, also through the anti-corruption law of January 2019. However, it needs to be completed. Indeed, no regulation sanctions conflict of interest for elected public officials, embezzlement in the private sector remains only partly criminalised, and provisions against lobbying do not apply to members of government and parliament. Moreover, the low efficiency of criminal justice in appeals continues preventing prosecuting corruption effectively. A reform of the criminal procedure and appeal system is still pending.

Search for corruption or justice in this document: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15845438...

It's there but with the clear and explicit intention that the free version will lag behind the commercial offers.

You are very lucky to live in a country where you can't even imagine that's an option. In countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, ... doctors won't see you if you can't pay. In some places you even have to provide donor blood to be able to get an operation! Leading to nightmares like this:

https://www.wired.com/2011/06/red-market-excerpt/

I think you're missing the point and purposefully misinterpreting this statement. Its not about tracking these people, its about allowing them to participate in today's world - from healthcare to mail.

I'd love to see some numbers on this. As far as I understand they are used for freight because it's better than to let them sit empty (and pilots and ground staff have to be paid too), but it still is not profitable.

Ah yes, you caught us supporting a drug network with 60k members, we will sue you for harming our business.

That depends on many factors. Living in a crowded European city I have plenty of shops in walking distance, protected sidewalks and a traffic nightmare. It would take me longer and I'd be much more likely to get into an accident when driving to any of the shops nearby; walking is easier and safer. If you have a city designed for cars like most US cities seem to be the story is very different.

Per se walking is definitely safer, given decent walking conditions. If all you got are sidewalk-less streets and only big shops that are a decent distance away, that's not the fault of walking but of bad city design. similarly in winter, if there's snow and your city clears the street but not the sidewalk then of course the sidewalk is less safe.

No, this was by design. The US and Europe wanted to encourage trade by developing countries, so built in cheaper rates for them. This also still makes sense for Rwanda or Nepal, less so for China which simply developed at an unexpected speed and scale. Obviously a mistake not to build any kind of automatic adjustment in...

Three counterarguments:

- if the opportunity costs are high, would it nonetheless not be better to have fair rates?

- if you believe in the market, why are there not already offers with more acceptable rates? Is there just not enough capital (which seems wrong, if you believe in your own claim that it's so profitable to invest), or because the risk is so high?

- most importantly, even if 40% was in fact an acceptable rate, what happens to those that can't repay? Say your crop is eaten by a bug or the local militia steals your harvest or you get injured and can't do the work - what happens to a poor person with a 40% loan? The answer is eternal, ever growing, unrepayable debt and suffering.

No thanks. This is not a kind gesture, this is Russian roulette - two chambers: you get even, two chambers: you make an enormous and sustainable profit, two chambers: your family is in debt for generations.

While it's good to have some data I would be careful with the assumptions. E.g. is 3 years a long enough time horizon?

There are also very different kinds of private equity, with the bain-like 'activist investors' the most notorious for their practices. So while many might not be so bad, there are also others that are just known for their semi-legal exploitative practices.

No matter whether or not we are actually looking at an extinct variety here, I found this article on an archeobotanist approach fascinating: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fruit-in-renaissance-a...

Essentially they look at old paintings for unknown fruit varieties and then try to find plants or seeds from the same area that still have those features and try to match paintings to fruits.

They ask questions by feature, so I assume Kia fares well just because they have usually far less features in their cars? No surprise to see Tesla low, but others (Porsche, Toyota) low is really surprising

Rumor was always that Skype used to have E2E, then Microsoft bought it for a susprising amount of money and as first action removed server-side encryption... And therefore of course the rumor/assumption thay the NSA or similar was in the back funding the deal.

They ask questions by feature, so I assume Kia fares well just because they have usually far less features in their cars? No surprise to see Tesla low, but others (Porsche, Toyota) low is really surprising.

Time for a GDPR information request to find out...

There are plenty of apps that can do this of you want it.

Sample size n=1 but a friend of mine was in the top 3 of CS in Hong Kong university and thus got to go abroad for a year. He described that back home they had to learn hundreds of specific 'best solutions' by heart and then regurgitate them on the test. He loved that he got actual challenges and got to work independently at the UK university where we met.

There are some built-in biases favoring some of the minorities, but there is a reason for this: to avoid that those minorities protest and push back against the PRC/Han China which in the mind of many is still an occupying force. Contrary to Chinese propaganda/school teaching these areas were hisotircally never/rarely in the same realm as the han-dominated regions.

But stepping away from perceptions: being any kind of critic (say, someone warning of a new corona virus epidemic) or just being the wrong religion/ethnicity can mean your life will be hell in China. Look at the treatment of those giving first warnings from Wuhan - even the globally/publicly known critics have been disappeared; and there are many more that never reached this visibility and have the same happen to them.

More at scale: more than 1 Million Uyghurs are in what propaganda calls 'vocational training institutions', which translates to them being brought to and held against their will in reeducation camps. The stories coming out of there ate nightmarish. Assigned CPC representatives live in their homes to keep watch, and in cases where one or several parents in those camps the children were forcibly put into orphanages and the parents have no chance to find out where they are and even less chance to get them back.

Sorry but China is absolutely and 100% oppressing these people, just for existing and daring to be born in a specific ethnicity/religion.

> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts."

I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.

How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?

What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?

The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.

The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint."

This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.

Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.

Oh no, the government knows which movies and series from a very limited and pre-filtered catalogue i have legally watched. Assuming Netflix has anything to do with mass surveillance seems rather absurd; or maybe I just haven't found the terror training section yet.

Can I ask why any private website even needs analytics? I just don't see the point. Is it just vanity, or making sure anyone actually reads the articles/content, or trying to adapt to audience preferences/search queries/...?

I get the point for any commercial venture but for most sides I simply don't see the added value. If you want to know whether people like your work add a comment section or a newsletter signup - why do you need to spy on your users with intrusive tools, send their data around the globe to kraken like google, just to have a few statistics?

There is no replication crisis. The correct approach is always to just see each study as one data point and in Popper's suggestion each time a study points in one direction this lends the relevant theory more weight. You might be able to repeat experiments but outside the hard sciences there simply is no one truth to rule them all, and even if you manage to replicate this is neither proof nor disproof that the theory/interpretation is fully right or that the results ate generalisable.

I am 100% s believer in science but the challenge is the signal to noise ratio - there's so much outputs that even niche experts struggle to follow their own field; for the population it's really hard to follow what is or isn't right. And often the advice/results are contradictory due to different focus. Nutrition research suggests to eat frequent small meals (is this still the right advice?), but also that fasting can be helpful. And if I stick to the small meals schedule my dentist will tell me that snacking is not good for the teeth as it keeps the mouth constantly acidic.

Similarly at policy level: there is much research, but often its application is very much dependent on the frame (eg city vs region vs national scale; strong-trust Nordic country context vs low-trust Balkans or US; etc).

In the end you need the policy decision to be well reasoned and evidence-based, but this is often difficult to manage and even more difficult to communicate (especially in a polarized society like the US where everyone is either friend or enemy in the political space).