pjscott

Indeed, Zoroaster has really been dropping the ball in matters regarding sorghum. :-(

Mushrooms are about 90% water, but the non-water part is indeed roughly half protein.

That response is more reasonable. I would put it more politely, but I agree on the substance.

If you had continued reading, you would have seen that the author opposes punishing families and is using this as an example case for a philosophical argument.

If a policy will predictably backfire, but the EU passes it anyway because the policy has good intentions, I would actually describe that as the EU's fault.

In a lot of states it’s illegal to charge money for the use of a restroom due to lobbying by the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America in the 1970s. (Of course, the unintended but entirely predictable consequence is that in a lot of places it became very hard to find a restroom of any sort, for the reasons discussed in this thread.)

When insurance companies are legally forced to choose between providing insurance at a loss and not providing it at all, they'll predictably choose the latter. I have to wonder: who on earth thought those price-restriction laws were a good idea?

Yeah, this is the thing that bothers me about people's response to robo-taxis. They're not compared to human drivers, who make mistakes all the time. They're compared to a theoretical ideal of perfection, and people get outraged when they inevitably fall short. The problems with the status quo are easy to overlook, just a normal part of life that everybody has come to accept -- but the problems with any attempted change are headline news.

As an American, it blew my mind to see people in Taiwan carrying around plastic bags of hot soup. It makes perfect sense from a physics standpoint, and the convenience of it was obvious, so my mind was only blown momentarily – but it was just so unexpected. I think that's the answer to your question: the grocery stores could switch packaging any time they wanted to, but they don't want to weird people out.

One thing to keep in mind when reading this article is that human cognition always halts after some number of decades. “Finite” does not mean small or insignificant, and it’s easy to read too much into even the best-reasoned impossibility arguments.

You're pointing at something real and important, but I think you've misdiagnosed the problem. We are spending more -- but we're getting a lot less bang for the buck, because costs in those sectors are spiraling out of control [1]. There's some structural reason why things like education are increasing in cost way faster than inflation, and that is what we really need to fix. Spending more money on those things is like bailing water out of the Titanic; it just makes the ship sink a little slower.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

You're somewhat misremembering a real thing. It's possible to profit by donating a piece of art to a museum and claiming its value to be much greater than what you'd get on the open market. This is tax fraud, though, and the IRS will probably notice.

> 1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.

The amount of money spent on those things, adjusted for inflation, has been going up over time in the US. Are we actually under-investing in those things? And how does wealth inequality indicate under-investment?

I can't argue with your aesthetic preferences, but you haven't yet stated a concrete harm.

> Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!

Is this bad on net? From what I've heard, the main political difference between the rich and the rest of the population is that they tend to be more pro-business. That sounds like a good counterweight to the popular antipathy toward business.

> Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.

NIMBYism is overwhelmingly driven by non-rich people, and most people who are rich have most of their wealth in stocks, which gives them an incentive to favor the construction of housing as a complementary good. Again, I'm not seeing the harm here.

> The old "i'm a philanthropist! (and totally not doing it for the tax breaks)" nonsense,

How does this work? Suppose that someone donates $1 million to charity. They don't pay income tax on that money -- but they no longer have the money. I suppose that they could try to get clever about it by making a "buy yachts for our donors" charity, but that's explicitly illegal under the 501(c)(3) requirements.

I'm not understanding the causation here. Some people are very rich, yes, but how does that harm the people who aren't rich?

The following can both be true, and IMO both are true:

1. The vast majority of right-wing content goes uncensored.

2. A few really choice targets for censorship get categorized as "misinformation", "disinformation", or "malinformation" and are subject to widespread campaigns of suppression.

(... And there may be systematic algorithmic down-weighting of some right-wing ideas or accounts, but I'm not confident enough in the evidence here to call it a serious problem, which is why there's no #3 on that list.)

Probably the most non-partisan example I can think of would be the Christchurch shooter's manifesto, a document which approximately everyone disagrees with. For a while after the massacre, it seemed like every social media platform was aggressively trying to make sure nobody could read the thing. You could find a copy with some effort, but only by skulking around in the shadier parts of the web. You could say that they're private companies and can do what they want -- but if they hadn't censored in lockstep, it's likely that some government displeasure would come down on the uncooperative companies later.

The result of this is a censorship regime that's hard to see because it only goes after the high-value targets.

Just about every personality trait with a name has a high degree of genetic heritability. We know this from e.g. studies of identical versus fraternal twins. And people abused as children tend to be closely related to their parents; we know this because we know where babies come from.

So, how much of the “chain of abuse” thing is just genetic confounding? I don’t know, which is vexing. As far as I can tell, very few of the chain-of-abuse theorists even think of genetics, even though it’s the elephant in the room, and many are hard-line blank slate believers. (I don’t have citations at the moment, but last time I looked at the relevant academic literature it was, broadly speaking, an absolute dumpster fire.)

In prison on what charges?

In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the parts concerning habeas corpus, bills of attainder, and ex post facto laws.)

Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs:

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is actually a really big deal. Next time you're tempted to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever more desperate" when talking about poverty, please take a moment first to remember that the opposite is true.

The idea behind delaying algebra is that if you teach math more slowly, the people who do worst in math will be able to progress somewhat further because they have more time to drill and repeat things. Someone who would have received an F in algebra in 8th grade might be able to scrape a D+ if they spend a year preparing and then take it in 9th grade. Empirically, they did indeed see a greater percentage of people passing algebra when they delayed it by a year. Of course, they also saw fewer people taking AP Calculus, since the slower pace of education meant that fewer people had the prerequisites in time.

So the big question is, why make everybody take the slow track? Why not offer the option of 8th grade algebra to students who are ready for it? As far as I can tell from listening to advocates, it actually is the Harrison Bergeron thing, but with a twist: the achievement gaps that they're trying to narrow have strong correlations with race and class, which makes closing those gaps almost a sacred cause. And that typically is where the arguments stop, in much the way that a mathematical proof stops when you say "QED".

In the US, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending on public education has roughly doubled in the past 50 years. If money were the real constraint, I would expect 1970s schools to be absolutely horrible compared to the schools today -- but standardized test scores for things like reading and math have been roughly flat over that time span.

Billionaires aren't the unlimited money piñata that you might hope; their total assets are less than federal yearly tax revenues, and good luck getting even a tiny fraction of that per year. As for corporations, I assume you're proposing raising the corporate tax rate -- but we're already near the revenue-maximizing peak of the Laffer curve on that particular tax, and there's just not much room to get more money that way.

(Also, only about a third of the incidence of corporate taxes falls on shareholders, with the rest being split about equally between lower wages for workers and higher prices for customers. It can be surprisingly regressive!)

Would the story be fine if you just hadn’t heard of the drama? (If so, then bringing it up might not be the best thing you could do here.)

“Practically human speed” is exactly what they’re aiming for. It’s meant to be used in human-speed applications, and to be as slow as possible in those use-cases without causing perceptible lag.

They're almost certainly not going to stop making Instant Pots. This is a chapter 11 bankruptcy -- the kind where the business gets restructured but continues to operate.

Treating Unicode strings as a sequence of code points is a completely valid thing to do, but is usually not what you actually care about when dealing with text. Really, are code points any less of an implementation detail?

So, to be clear: the police stole a bunch of phones, some of which had the passcode disabled, and sold them without wiping the data... and you place the blame on the phone manufacturer? The only people in this story who haven't messed up, and the only ones who made an effort to protect the user's privacy?

The problem is that about 20% of the phones in the study had the passcode disabled, and another 5% had easy-to-guess passcodes.