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quantumwannabe

1,033 karma · joined April 13, 2015

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quantumwannabe··on Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
Why don’t you actually look up the religion and ethnicity of those people instead of blindly asserting that they are Protestants and Anglo-Saxons? You haven’t cited a single source showing that the leadership of the Ivy League are WASPs, but you’re claiming that all over this thread. If you’re going to make the bold assertion that the leaderships of those schools prefer applicants of their own ethnicity and religion, you better back it up with evidence, or else you just look like a bigoted racist.
quantumwannabe··on Office vacancy rate in San Francisco just hit a new high
That’s an interesting way to phrase cities being subsidized by taxes paid by/on the behalf of suburban commuters.
quantumwannabe··on Wooting Two He – Analog Switches Keyboard
According to that review, it's only average for writing and programming due to it being wired and the wrist-rest being an optional addon. I wouldn't consider those things deal-breakers.
quantumwannabe··on Tesla fires after hurricane raises alarm for Florida officials
Maybe it focuses on Teslas because the quoted official personally witnessed a Tesla burning?

https://twitter.com/jimmypatronis/status/1578050503279316992

https://twitter.com/jimmypatronis/status/1580963218155270146

quantumwannabe··on Why Men Are Hard to Help
It literally is done to reduce sexual pleasure. Circumcision was popularized in the US as a way to stop masturbation, which doctors believe was responsible for various social and medical problems.

From Wikipedia’s bios on two of the people responsible for the spread of the practice, Lewis Sayre and John Harvey Kellogg:

> In 1870, Sayre began using circumcision as a purported cure for several cases of young boys diagnosed with paralysis or significant motor problems. He thought the procedure ameliorated such problems based on a "reflex neurosis" theory of disease, which held that excessive stimulation of the genitals (i.e., masturbation) was a disturbance to the equilibrium of the nervous system and a cause of systemic problems.

>Kellogg did promote extensive measures to prevent masturbation addiction. He circumcised himself at age 37. His methods for the "rehabilitation" of masturbation addicts included measures up to the point of cutting off part of the genitals, without anesthetic, on both sexes; he wrote men who did should be circumcised and women that did should have carbolic acid applied to their clitoral glans.

quantumwannabe··on PO-80 Record Factory
This appears to be a rebranding (at nearly three times the price) of the Gakken Record Maker (which is still available online for its MSRP of ¥7,980 ($55) [1]). It even comes with a copy of the Gakken magazine! Here's a review of the Gakken record maker (which looks identical to the Teenage Engineering one) [2], the Japanese description from Gakken [3], and an English description from a reseller [4].

Gakken is a Japanese educational company. One of their products is a magazine called "Otona no Kagaku" (Adult Science) which comes with a kit to build a toy version of a mechanical or electronic device. Because they're part of a magazine, the kits are only available for a limited time. Here's some examples of the other issues' kits [5]. Some of the more notable ones are a wax cylinder recorder [6] and a gramophone kit [7].

[1] https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/NEOBK-2453544 https://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4057507221/gkp_shu... https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB8qtW19nf4

[3] https://otonanokagaku.net/magazine/vol46/index.html

[4] https://www.turntablelab.com/products/gakken-easy-record-mak...

[5] https://otonanokagaku.net/ https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/series/2993 https://www.adafruit.com/category/269

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9X2CS4cs8o

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDdZFFLnsUo

quantumwannabe··on Nvidia in the Valley
A spiritual successor to Second Life with modern graphics and VR support would likely be very successful. Dumbed-down versions like Fortnite Creative and Roblox have been very popular. Zuckerberg won't be the one to build a successful metaverse game though, not because Meta doesn't employ skilled game developers, but because culturally the leadership is completely out of touch. Second Life thrived because of its uncontrolled player creation environment, which Meta would never allow. It let you 3D model and script anything you could think of using in-game (and external) tools and had a free market economy where the developer only took a cut when converting to/from real world currency. The whole debacle with the "virtual 'groping'" and the personal space bubble has demonstrated that even if Facebook's Metaverse did have good creative tools, all it would take is a single article written by a journalist with an axe to grind for them to cripple it. They've already removed legs from avatars in Horizon Worlds for "safety", which is ridiculous.
quantumwannabe··on Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
Hitler went to prison and came out stronger and more popular. Oppressing him didn't work, but there was a chance that the German people could have been convinced that National Socialism wouldn't improve the economy and restore Germany to its pre-WWI glory.
quantumwannabe··on U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
Why should you have the right to vote in a place where you don't live?
quantumwannabe··on 5th Circuit Rejects First Amdt. Challenge to TX Social Media Common Carrier Law
Full Opinion Here: https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/NetchoicevPaxt...
quantumwannabe··on Can the American mall survive?
Sounds like KidZania:

https://dallas.kidzaniausa.com/

https://g.page/KidZaniaUSA

quantumwannabe··on Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not for human connection
No, you're building an off-campus college dorm for ASU. Calling that development a city is a joke. You have fewer amenities within walking distance than the apartments closer to the campus, which have parking.
quantumwannabe··on Why American cities are broke (2021) [video]
Can someone name an example of a city that has gone bankrupt due to infrastructure costs that didn't also lose a large amount of its population or lose key local industries?
quantumwannabe··on Apple warns suppliers to follow China rules on 'Taiwan' labeling
Tim Cook also invested a third of a trillion dollars in China because they did not have the manufacturing capabilities to build the iPhone how Apple wanted at the time of the investment. [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-tim-cook-275-billion-c...

quantumwannabe··on In Supreme Court brief, Yale and peers defend use of race in admissions
Because schools withhold a large percentage of their spots for "legacy students", a White kid who isn't rich or well-connected is less likely to get into these elite schools than an Asian kid with the same grades. Half of the White students at Harvard are legacy students [1] and White students make up 44% of the Harvard student body. 50.9% of Gen Z is White [2], meaning that slightly less than 51% of the population is competing for 22% of the slots. The same numbers for Asian students are 5.3% of Gen Z and 25.9% of the spots at Harvard. Now, the proper numbers to use are probably SAT scores or some other "skill metric", but finding the proper stats to use is difficult since College Board locked them down, and in this case the population stats don't affect the conclusion because while more Asians have high scores as a percentage of their group than Whites do, it is canceled out by the difference in population sizes.

Assuming Affirmative Action is still in place, once the current generation of Asian Ivy League grad's kids start applying for schools, this issue will start to apply to Asian kids as well.

[1] https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphi...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/less-than-half-of-us-chil...

quantumwannabe··on Riding transit takes almost twice as long as driving (2017)
Your idea is actually how car-dependent cities are laid out. Look at a map of Phoenix for a textbook example: the city is laid out on a square mile grid with retail/offices on the grid corners. People may drive to go shopping, but that's a choice, they could walk there (if they want to brave the heat) since for most of the city the nearest shopping area is less than a mile (1.6 km) away.
quantumwannabe··on The richer people get, the more meat they eat
Additionally, the only way to lower emissions from animals is to genocide them. It's not just that they are likely to die if left to their own devices, leaving them to roam freely in nature results in them emitting the exact same amount of carbon as when they were farmed for meat (which is net zero, but that's besides the point).
quantumwannabe··on US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design
Or people will just have a nuclear tower on their lawn. If it can be buried (or partially buried), the tower need not be taller than the house. With some decorations similar to the ones on cell phone towers, it could even look reasonably attractive.
quantumwannabe··on Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas
The people who are vocal about those issues and share the perspective that you are implying are not the majority. There are lots of people who take the opposite stance on those issues, and the largest group (larger than both of the passionate sides combined) is those who don't really care either way.
quantumwannabe··on Spain will introduce free train travel
Not for highways. Those are paid for by gas taxes, and before you bring it up, the only reason the highway trust fund is insolvent is due to diversions to fund transit. Local roads are also funded with property tax money as well as gas tax/car registration money, but good luck having a functional city even if every person uses transit without roads, so its hard to argue that drivers are subsidized because of that. Buses, taxis, bikes, and delivery vehicles need roads too and heavy vehicles damage roads significantly more than cars do.

The fact is that parking taxes, gas taxes, tolls, registration fees, etc. are often diverted to fund transit, but transit fees are not diverted to fund auto infrastructure. Transit is subsidized at a much higher percentage basis than roads are; I'm more than happy to pay the true cost of roads (excluding arbitrary """externalities"""), but I doubt you would be willing to pay unsubsidized transit fares. As an example, only 24.44% of the MTA's operating expenses are paid for by fares [1], and NYC has a higher farebox recovery ratio than most cities. If you lived in New York, would you really be willing to pay $11.25 each way (so $22.50 round trip), instead of $2.75 ($5.50 round trip), for a subway ride? That's the equivalent of driving 19.2 miles one-way (38.5 mile round trip), including the cost of the car, gas, insurance, and taxes paid to fund the roads (using the IRS rate of 58.5 cents a mile, which in my experience is an over estimate on actual costs incurred). In the city I live in, which dense but not Manhattan level dense, the unsubsidized cost of a rail ticket is around $30 a trip, or $60 round-trip, which almost no one would be willing to pay (those numbers came directly from the agency's budget). None of the transit numbers include capital costs, so the real unsubsidized cost is even higher. Roads are not subsidized to the tune of 75+% of total cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#North_A...

quantumwannabe··on Spain will introduce free train travel
You do know that the bridge and tunnel tolls in Manhattan are used to subsidize mass transit? Drivers subsidize transit users in NYC, not the other way around.
quantumwannabe··on We're going to need a lot of solar panels
That isn't car centric development, that is urban development in a city that fell into hard times. The whole area in the picture is about one square mile (i.e. it was the dense core of the city), and during boom times it was full of buildings. Many of the buildings were torn down when their owners could no longer afford to maintain them and they were replaced with parking lots because they look a lot better than overgrown fields. As the city revitalizes, the parking lots will be built over and turned back into buildings.
quantumwannabe··on FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores
The numbers on the GP's page include the value of government benefits. If you exclude the European social benefits, their median disposable income is even lower.

>The following table represents data from OECD's "median disposable income per person" metric, which includes all forms of income as well as taxes and transfers in kind from governments for benefits such as healthcare and education and is equivalised by dividing by the square root of household size. This metric, in addition to using a median rather than a mean, uses "data calculated according to the new OECD terms of reference"; compared to previous terms of reference, these "include a more detailed breakdown of current transfers received and paid by households as well as a revised definition of household income, including the value of goods produced for own consumption as an element of self-employed income." As OECD displays median disposable incomes in each country's respective currency, the values were converted here using the World Bank's PPP conversion factors, accounting for each country's cost of living in the year that the disposable median income was recorded. Unless noted otherwise, all data refers to 2019. Data are in United States dollars at current prices and current purchasing power parity for private consumption for the reference year.

quantumwannabe··on Japan's NTT to begin remote work as norm for 30k employees
You can buy exotic produce online these days, so you can mitigate that if you know what you want.
quantumwannabe··on As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
No university class teaches modern compilers and the state of the art is in open source projects. If someone is interested in compilers, they don’t need to get a PhD in order to learn. Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams; they are willing to train you on the job. The supply of people interested is just low in general, and if you are biased towards people with PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires, of course you will find a shortage of workers.
quantumwannabe··on Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
Not a single one of those was a mass shooting by the common definition. They were all just random murders/attempted murders, which your continent has quite a lot of as well. The only difference is you don't have lobbyists who compile lists on Wikipedia.
quantumwannabe··on The Birth and Death of the Office
Most American cities have their jobs distributed throughout the city, and don’t have mega skyscrapers. The more sprawling the city, the more evenly distributed the jobs are. Mixed use zoning has no effect on commute times because it doesn’t matter that an office is near your home, what matters is that your office is near your home. Most people don’t move every time they change jobs, so even if someone originally lived near work they may not in the future, and couples may have jobs in different locations. The US and Europe have nearly identical average commute times [1][2].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47....

quantumwannabe··on Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs
If they commute 235 miles per year then they don’t need a train at all because that is a commute of around half a mile each way per day which is easily walkable. That number is so ridiculously low I suspect the source is wrong.
quantumwannabe··on Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
First off, you didn't say "school" originally, you just said mass shooting and there have been several in the UK since the gun ban; also it doesn't matter if innocent people are killed at a school or elsewhere, what matters is that they were killed. Secondly, the "zero deaths" shooting had 12 wounded; the lack of deaths wasn't for a lack of trying and I'm sure those people would have preferred not to have been shot. Thirdly, most of those American mass shootings in the Wikipedia article aren't mass shootings in that they aren't some crazy killing random strangers, they are gang violence; you may as well include all of the UK's gang homicides then. Many of the school "mass shootings" also had no deaths. For example, Wikipedia counts this as a school shooting: "An individual who was not a student accidentally shot himself in the leg in the parking lot of Glades Central High School". No reasonable person can say that is the same as what happened in Texas, and dozens of the "school shootings" in the list are similar to the parking lot accident.

The deadliest mass shooting of all time happened in France in 2015 and the second deadliest happened in Norway in 2011 (yes, deadlier than any American mass shooting). Europe has had a large number of mass killings. Here's a PARTIAL list (since there are no activist groups compiling lists of "mass" "shootings" in Europe like there are in the US, it's difficult to find them without scanning old news articles) of SCHOOL shootings in Europe over the last twenty years (and yes it is fair to compare the US to all of Europe due to population and size; European countries are equivalent to American states (which have varying degrees of gun control)): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31515008. Additionally, there have been a lot of European mass killings that weren't targeted at schools like the Manchester Arena Bombing, Charlie Hebdo, the aforementioned Bataclan and Oslo massacres, the Nice truck attack, the various vehicle ramming attacks in London and elsewhere in Europe, and more. Your gun bans haven't prevented crazies from killing massive amounts of innocents, neither with guns nor with other methods.

quantumwannabe··on Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
Not true. There was one literally less than a year ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_shooting

Another one in 2018:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moss_Side_shooting

And another in 2010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings

And in 2009:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massereene_Barracks_shooting

Britain has also had numerous mass stabbings, bombings, and vehicle ramming attacks.

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