riversflow

> This is much like legislation around traditional weapons.

The problem with that comparison is that it would be very obvious and noteworthy if Nestle started to drop bombs or hired mercenaries to prey on villages who tried to fight their abusive water practices, or whatever analogous weapons fiction you can imagine to Big Tech abusing their data and resources for invasive spying. People would die and/or be injured, likely property would be destroyed--these are extremely tangible things.

Big tech could be using facial recognition for years and fly under the radar. Privacy is essentially intangible.

Perhaps the light truck exemption should stay, but all exempt vehicles pay a punitive mileage tax. My feeling here is that pickups as _actual_ tool/utility vehicles is valid, but we should punish the use of such dangerous vehicles when they don’t serve a purpose. A tradesmen owning a truck that he uses to transport materials and tools is one thing. The dude who works in sales at a software company and has used the bed once since he bought the truck to go camping is another.

I’m not sure though, the overarching problem is that the US is vast, and what is good in one place is bad in the other.

A large 4x4 truck is a menace in a dense city, but a car is crap in places with poor roads and snow. Both are common.

No, we don’t. Let me introduce you to OSHA and their buddy worker’s comp insurance.

I ran an industrial facility that had been in operation since the 40’s, safety used to not even be a concern. If it operated in 2000 the way it did in 1950’s, or even in the early 80’s, they’d be out of business.

I don't even think we've lost the engineering. We've lost the risk tolerance. Apollo was a risky program, people dying was considered acceptable. The US just doesn't work like that any more.

Oh same. I think it is far, far worse. Sports betting has a really gross social component where the group applies social pressure to push casual spectators to "put their money where their mouth is", I don't think sports betting at a venue should be illegal, but I also don't think letting anyone place bets with a booky from the drunken comfort of their friend's living room is at all beneficial for society.

> they glue it shut when they don't need to (bad).

Disagree. Glue isn't really that hard to deal with and likely makes the phone substantially more waterproof. It's really not hard, at all, to deal with glue, it's typically dissolves in acetone and only requires mild heat to overcome.

My substance was that my Apple products consistently out live every other electronic manufacturer's. I have an iMac and a MBP that are both over a decade old now and run great. The hardware is excellent after putting a new battery in the MBP and an SSD in the iMac. Especially the 2013 MBP with Retina display, its still an awesome machine even at 10 years old. The biggest problems with old iPhones are banking Apps and cellular connectivity.

Until we find a way of mineral extraction and purification that isn't terrible, electronics are going to be bad. Could Apple work to improve that? Yes, and they should too. My point, which I'd argue is pragmatic, is that Apple makes the longest lived devices you can currently buy, and not by a little but by a lot.

Demonizing the current front runner in a competition you care about? ...well lets just say you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar

My house is full Apple products, the average device is well over 5 years old. The gaming PC I built after the MBP I use is virtually worthless now, as the motherboard is fried and buying a new socket LGA 1150 motherboard just isn't worth it.

All electronics are the result of dystopian horors, and they generally don't have a very good shelf life. Are you aware of how many SuperFund sites are in Silicon Valley?

I find all this handwringing about cosmetics gambling ridiculous when sports betting is becoming more and more accepted and legal.

Overwatch *had lootboxes. Now it has a BattlePass you buy, new heros are locked behind buying the BattlePass or grinding the first ~40 levels to get it for free, and also premium cosemtics in a FOMO-style "today's deals" daily rotation store. No lootboxes. I miss OW lootboxes. I'm not a gambler but the surprise/novelty was fun, and once I had most cosemtics I wanted I could also just collect them which was satisfying. I had >500 and double digits of every seasonal loot box at the end of OW1.

One of my favorite parts of AppleTV is that it has those beautiful screensavers.

I've been doing IF consistently for about a decade. I never needed to lose weight, I did it to improve my healthspan. This is just my experience so obviously YMMV

1) I drink coffee in the morning too. No stomach problems yet, but I'm completely dependent on caffeine. Last summer I did a 4 month hiatus from caffeine and at the end I determined the tradeoff for me wasn't worth it. The energy and focus is just too valuable, to go without.

2) If it's going well, I wouldn't worry about it. At some point your body will stop having a huge fat reserve to burn off, and you will find that your energy levels crater and recover very slowly if you exert yourself too much for a given macro load.

3) You should try an extended fast! My response to "you are skipping the most important meal of the day" is "I don't even eat every day, fasting is good for you". If they press the issue I'll tell them about fasting for 5 days and how good it makes me feel.

And extended fasts really do make me feel amazing after the fact.

Is it good when people specialize in destructive things? There are people who specialize in human trafficing, different types of fraud, etc. Is that an n-way mutual losss?

> Governments are going to ask some people reading this thread to do them favors.

I mean, my expectation is that those are the kind of offers you can’t refuse.

Why do you not find information asymmetry completely harmful?

Bullets don’t kill people, the guy pulling the trigger on the gun does. Spies don’t pull the trigger.

I believe literally all those things you don’t believe about having something being completely separate from using it. A car can kill people just as easily as a gun. So what? It’s who used the object who is responsible for what it does and owning something doesn’t necessarily imply using it or even imply it at all.

How do you justify that point of view? I really don’t get that perspective.

I can’t say for certain, but I doubt extraordinary rendition is only using "terrorist-detector model” and not relying on analysts/tips. Also worth noting is that it seems like it hasn’t happened in ~20 years, and was a product of 9/11 fervor.

Let me put it another way. Why should the powerful countries take weaker ones at their word and not employ fact checkers? Nations are only really beholden to their constituents and greater powers. Why would any country tell a major power who wasn’t spying the truth?

Correct.

> this is exactly attempting to apply personal morality to the "international system"

I can do that. Nobody should lie, it's wrong. So, as long as every nation stops lying, they can stop spying too. Easy Peasy.

> Shouldn't we care whether the things that the justice system is punishing people for are things that are actually good or bad?

Absolutely. Which is why usually friendly-nation spies don't seem to get in trouble. Take a look at this list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies

I think lying/misrepresenting is bad and very harmful, however I also think it is human nature, and spying helps to alleviate that information asymmetry.

> We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information.

How can you possibly know that, are you claiming to be privy to the forecasts generated by the information gathered by US spies? Further, as stated later, spying is the status quo, if spying stopped wholesale wouldn't keeping information private be significantly more valuable?

> Reason 1 . . . literally any spying could be justified this way.

I don't give a solitary care about the spying a foreign government does. Why should I? They don't have jurisdiction over me. I care about what it does with that intel, but that is completely separate, which gets us to your Reason 2.

> Essentially anything that's outside of the status quo is suddenly classified as a risk. Basically our spy agencies' jobs become protecting the entrenched interests of those already in power

No, that isn't the job of spies, they gather intelligence. You are confusing other government actions with spying.

> Reason 3

Again, do you have some sort of inside track on the DoD(or some other 3 letters)? You have concocted a hypothetical about a Joe Shmoe, being caught in a dragnet filter. Is that actually a real problem? Or just a hypothetical about where this slippery slope goes.

Overall I think the burden of proof is on the group who wants to go against the status quo; nations constantly spy on one another. Justify why we shouldn't spy, rather than pointing out it's pitfalls.

This just seems incredibly idealistic to me.

Brazilian law isn't US law, if Brazil wants to it can try and arrest spies I guess. That's all there is to it.

> I think "personal ethics" applies to everything and everyone in the world.

I think that spies have the moral agency to gather and report information in order to better promote the welfare of their countrymen.

> I think they should be incentivized to do so much less

How? That's an impossible task in my book, and the main reason I think that spies are ethically just is because it's the nature of the beast. If you figure out a good way to do this, might I suggest focusing your efforts on de-militarization instead of de-espionage? The people with bombs and tanks are the one's who do the most damage.

I don't contend that the DoE or any other agency has a right to privacy from Brazil. Spy craft is just a part of international politics, turnabout is fair play.

The bigger you are, the farther you have to fall. The most powerful nation on earth also has the most to lose.

Huh. I completely agree with this justification for spying, to the point I would be upset if they weren’t spying in this way. To me spy craft is where personal ethics become less important than realpolitik. The most powerful country in the world should have an inside track on whats going on in important markets, by hook or by crook. That’s the governments job.

On what grounds does Petrobras have any right to privacy from the USG?

> People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

This is ludicrous. Just like no man is an island, no city is self contained. Should the city be able to dump whatever pollutants into the river it sits on? Burn whatever, whenever as much as they want? Nobody else gets a say?

Other people share the same regional, state, and national identities with people who live in the city, should those people not get a say in how the place they actually live is run?

It's taught that the Green revolution was what broke Malthus, but so far we haven't solved the core problem(finite natural resources), only kicked the can down the road(we can turn crude oil into extra food).

I hate to be so grim, but your position is, "technology has allowed humans to dominate the planet and push up our carry capacity. Externalities are building up as a result of those technologies and they make our enviroment less hospitable. We have yet figured out how to not do that, despite the problem being significantly more difficult now that we are locked in to supporting more people. But we will do it, for sure. "

Is the last part saying that because their are have nots we are fine? You completely ignore the "we don't know how to make basic stuff at the quantities needed in a sustainable way" bit. I don't think banking on the discovery of new technology and having enough coordination as a species to implement that tech in a timely enough fashion is so safe that doubting it should be controversial.

Nah, you read that right, thanks for sending me that. However, that study is on people with chronic insomnia. Here is a study[1] saying that it showed benefit for fibromyalgia patients. Both of these studies are tiny tho.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6548970/

I mean, I can take a logo and create a vector image in Illustrator in an hour, without any tool. I'm not even skilled with Illustrator.

This would actually be convincing if SBF did have ready wealthy parents, lol.

So if anyone here is really desperate to get deep sleep and can’t despite lots of effort, it might be worth looking into Delta sleep inducing peptide(DSIP). My father has fibromyalgia and struggles to get any restorative sleep most nights, I came across DSIP while trying to figure out how to help him. Unfortunately I can’t speak to it’s effectiveness as neither of us can afford DSIP, although it has come down significantly in price in the last several years.

> Your body reaches the peak in your 20s.

Citation needed. Plenty of people only reach their physical peak at 35+. It's not too late!

> You have to accept it and move on

No, you don't. You can bounce back, but it requires effort. All I can say is it's better to learn early than when you are 65+ and just had major surgery that you need to bouce back from if you want to keep living a normal life.

> Respecting authority, is just a trait of smart people.

Is it though? I thought drug experimentation was linked to people with a higher IQ. [1] That would sort suggest the opposite.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/high-iq-k...