nichohel

I think what the daughter was saying is that the abuse and craziness of her father would, in a sense, give some explanation for her own initially troubled path.

Very much so: the Acer Predator gaming laptops have been great for me. They suspend/resume like a champ and have the horsepower for Linux Steam gaming. Their price point is excellent for what you get. Of course they look ridiculous, are heavy, and the battery life is not great but they'll do a couple hours watching a movie in the hot tub, which is all I really care about as far as battery life.

And an inverter!

Remember small claims court. Having just won $600 from a local company that damaged my property, I can say it works!

Is this the best path to improving computational power efficiency in the next decades?

ETFs do pay out dividends from the underlying stocks. This does not require you to look at the account (in the US you will get a form at the end of the year summarizing what you have to pay taxes on).

When 95% of the people in the world are stamp-collectors, and stamp-collecting is a harmful activity, then yes ... I would wear that label proudly.

Well done, but politically charged. For example, why don't we see an item like "Human activity causes general climate warming trend but all-cause climate-related deaths (flood, drought, extreme temperatures) continue massive trend downward"?

https://ourworldindata.org/ofdacred-international-disaster-d... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_r...

edit: fixed link

As I said, this concept also applies to other asset classes inflated by QE, such as stocks. I didn't say the house was the primary house (in which case there is some capital gain exclusion complicating matters anyway).

So, no.

QE may make "the rich" seem richer in nominal terms, but in reality they are generally poorer. Here is what I mean:

If the house I paid $250,000 for ten years ago is now "worth" $1,000,000 due to asset inflation arising from quantitative easing, I still own the same house. I am not really richer in a real sense as long as I still hold the house. I have $750,000 more nominal dollars in assets, but the dollar is just a unit of accounting. The house has not changed!

If I then try to actually realize some of that nominal dollar gain by selling the house, I will pay about $250,000 "capital gains" tax on $750,000 even though I have not really seen any real-world gain (the house did not change). The government primarily benefits from this tax paid. So maybe I actually get to see $500,000 in nominal gain, after I pay the tax.

But then I can use the post-tax "gain" of $500,000 to buy fun things, like better food or a cool car or a better house? Not really, if the food or car or house has also doubled in price over that interval. In fact, by assumption houses have tripled in price over this interval, and with tax losses I am worse off if I put the money in a new house, because now my $500,000 in gain plus the $250,000 I started with won't even buy as good a house as my old $250,000 house was, which now costs $1,000,000. [Edited to include the $250,000 I started with. The concept is unchanged.]

The same argument applies to increasing stock values. QE inflation makes people seem nominally richer, but in reality capital gains taxes actually make them poorer if they try to utilize these nominal gains.

There are subtleties to this argument and the step-up basis issue is a real thing (which would only prevent the frictional loss of taxation!) but the main point above does not seem to be appreciated.

The idea that there are "ever-increasing levels of poverty" in western democracies is transparently false. Would you like to try to provide some evidence for that?

As a father also, I want to reassure you that you have no cause for concern: this condition only occurs in very small populations that are at risk of deportation from liberal western countries.

The disease seems to be contagious--socially contagious. By this I mean that once it is realized that having a child lie motionless in bed is an effective way to block deportation proceedings, thanks to the extremely accommodating Swedish immigrant/refugee medical and social support apparatus, others in similar situations try it too.

I don't want to diminish the very significant hardships many of these immigrant/refugees are under. If telling my child to just lie still in bed, when the social worker comes by, allows my family to stay in Sweden instead of being sent back to Syria, I would probably do it too. If it was a requirement for a NG feeding tube to be placed in the child, even that might be an unpleasant but ultimately worthwhile sacrifice.

Resignation Syndrome seems to reliably and rapidly abate once the threat of deportation is removed. Is that because a massive stressor is removed and mental health can be regained? Or is it because a pretense can be lifted once the threat of deportation is removed?

My impression, after viewing the documentary "Life Overtakes Me" some time ago, is that the answer to this question is: to avoid deportation by feigning mental illness.

No, the issue in question here is sustained sailing faster than the wind directly downwind, which is not what water yachts and sailboats are doing. The connection (belt, gear) between the wheels and the propeller is necessary to do the former.

The two companies named are of course receiving PPP "loans". So they are literally being paid, by you (American taxpayer), to annoy you.

https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/r-squ...

https://www.sba.com/ppp-funded-companies/florida/tellza-inc-...

The responses are valid as far as they go, but the larger point is that the government in a jurisdiction is free to inflate its own currency at great benefit to itself while simultaneously extracting taxes on fictitious "gains" of other currencies or equivalents (like BTC) against that currency.

Possibly funny thought: If you have to declare a capital gain on every BTC purchase of a cup of coffee, why can't you declare a capital loss every time you spend dollars that you earned long ago, and which have decreased significantly in value since then, due to inflation?

I don't believe this claim from their web site: "you can still run your favourite apps…, conveniently access your bank accounts". If you don't have access to Play Store, you have no easy way to install your favorite apps (say Waze) or your bank's app, because those are not on f-Droid or available through direct download. Running these "favorite" apps is possible in principle in a Google-free environment with something like microg, but how does an average user get them installed? From where?

I have a run a Google-free phone for years now (currently crDroid on Moto G7) and I have experimented with moving apks from a second phone (with Play Store installed) to the de-Googled phone and it is quite an effort. So I keep my old phone shut down, at home, with only WiFi access as needed (no sim card) when I need to deposit a check by image for my bank for example. But I have no good solution for proprietary apps I want to use on the road, like Waze, without a great deal of effort. Yes there are acceptable open alternatives to many proprietary apps but these are in some cases not my "favourite".

Yes, I would certainly think that. Especially since given the timing of the article those on ventilators when the article was written probably had been on the ventilators for longer times on average, which doesn't bode well for them. Apparently a follow-up study is coming. I looked for it and did not find it yet.

The original paper is: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184

My guess is that in the final analysis, NYC death figures for those on ventilators will be higher than they should have been (after adjusting for age etc.) The question then will be why.

But the real question, I think, is whether the death rates were higher than they would have been with less aggressive ventilator use.

Thanks for the link.

In the paper I see no direct comparison between COVID response to ventilation vs ARDS response to ventilation, but I think I understand that you say the responses are similar, based on your experience. Am I getting that right?

Also, of course, there is nothing in the paper comparing COVID invasive ventilation outcomes with, for example, oxygen and positioning treatment outcomes. So, interesting, but I don't think this qualifies as "data over anecdote".

I take it you are a pulmonary or ER doctor. If so, can you comment on the widely circulated claim that high death rates on ventilators in NYC are likely in part attributable to very aggressive ventilation and/or reduced attention to ventilation settings due to extreme fear of exposure to the virus (tubes leading from patients to other rooms and the like)?

I said nothing even approximately like "all those people are probably going to die anyway" and that is not, in fact, what I think! It is offensive that you would make up something like that and claim that is what I said.

What a growing number of doctors are saying is that ventilators often turn out to do more harm than good in treating COVID, ventilators have been used too soon and too often in treating COVID, and ventilators have probably resulted in excess deaths over alternative treatments.

I appreciate the effort, but it looks like we aren't going to need nearly as many ventilators as expected because COVID lung problems are different than other lung conditions and seem not to respond well to invasive ventilation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elgct0nOcKY

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/health/coronavirus-ventilator...

The video in particular is telling, highlighting the difficulty in getting a hospital to change what is considered the standard procedure in the face of new conditions (told by a frontline doc).

We are going to be up to our eyeballs in excess ventilators. Maybe they'll be handy for the next pandemeic ...

This is the view advanced by Benjamin Wittes, made popular in a recent NPR piece which you may have heard or read. I am not convinced it is right. Have you read the rebuttal by David Brick, currently the first comment on https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be... ?

The entire rebuttal is a bit long to repost, but essentially, Brick says Wittes is taking that statement of Franklin's as applying to the entirety of his letter when in fact "[t]he real context of the quote is actually a very small portion of that letter in which the authors are discussing the defensive needs of certain 'freemen' living on the frontiers, or 'backwoods' areas of the colony." Furthermore, Brick states that Franklin made very similar statements elsewhere where the meaning is very clear--and in line with the conventional pro-liberty understanding, not Wittes' pro-government-power understanding.

I would like to see some historians argue it out.

Summary: FOR THE CHILDREN!!!

The SCO lawsuit targeted Linux vendors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

Earlier a USL (Unix System Lab) lawsuit went after some BSD stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

Forced labor of any sort just seems tricky especially when there is a racial disparity among those so penalized. Prison work programs also seem like a good idea ("teach a trade" etc.) but then they are couched as essentially slave labor and they sound less good.

The "had to essentially work for the school doing e.g. grounds keeping and other tasks" seems problematic.

I'm sorry, what did I say? You may have confused me with someone else.

And how many people can pay for schooling their children twice, once for the the public school they aren't using, and then again for a private school? Or, afford to not work and homeschool their children?