rlue

+300, it’s kind of tragic that the general public’s concern around GMOs seems centered on the perceived dangers of ingesting them, rather than Monsanto’s relentless track record of predatory litigation and their apparent mission to monopolize global agriculture.

I’d be interested to hear examples of large-scale industry players voluntarily accepting the costs of their externalities to any meaningful degree (i.e. more than just-enough-to-make-a-good-PR-campaign). My belief is that in the absence of regulation, the survival advantages conferred by socializing costs and privatizing losses are sufficient to eliminate larger conscientious (or so-called “socially responsible”) organizations.

So-called niche media hype is the reason gp thinks cat women are the product of toxoplasmosis. A general explanation for cat women themselves (along with all your other examples) is culture.

No, that is not the kind of equality this discussion is about.

In this case, we are asking whether two hypothetical people who are completely identical in every way except for their genitals will receive the same opportunities, rewards, and treatment from their employers and their peers.

It is not for public policy to speculate on which parent will produce more value for the baby or the household by staying at home. The point you were responding to originally was this: If you mandate more parental leave for women than for men, you end up creating an incentive for employers to hire men instead of women (or choose to let women go when layoffs come around), because their benefits cost less.

That is the type of gender inequality we are talking about, and I hope you will agree that fixing it is not a "false goal".

I am a staunch supporter of bicycle infrastructure and a daily bicycle commuter, but I remain unconvinced by percentage-growth figures like this. In many large cities (especially LA, where I live), bicycles represent a vanishing minority of road traffic; an extra 155% of almost nothing is still almost nothing.

I don’t have data on hand, but just a casual glance on an average day suggests that fewer than 1% of road users in my neighborhood are on bicycles—and that’s in Downtown Culver City, a mixed-use/pedestrian-friendly urbanist oasis. I’m sad to say that Culver City recently decided to dismantle its dedicated bike lanes, despite reported figures of >50% increases in bicycle traffic.[0]

I want more bicycle infrastructure, but I do not feel well-equipped to argue my case when even with the bike lanes in place, I’ve never seen two bicycles waiting at the same red light—all while car traffic is piled up as far as the eye can see.

[0]: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/culver-city-bike-lane-proje...

I strongly support (m/p)aternity leave equality, but I can think of lots of reasons new mothers should be able to take more time off.

Except why would Walmart leave if there were still sufficient consumer demand to capitalize off of?

That was a figure of speech meaning “to receive very harsh criticism”.

Has no one noticed that there seems to be no control group in this study? Every participant wrote a statement that got torn to shreds; every participant had to write their emotions about it.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that watching cartoons for ten minutes or just sitting in silence would produce a comparable reduction in anger. Really disappointing that a pair of career academics could get away with such an astounding oversight (and get published in Nature, no less).

Maybe I missed something, but seems very weird to compare kg of diesel fuel to kg of battery. The posted article's figure of 272Wh/kg is for battery capacity, not energy yield from source fuel.

I really like miniflux, but I really wish it had a weighted post ordering rather than a simple chronological ordering. I posted a feature request about this earlier this year[0], but the gist is this:

If you subscribe to some feeds that post 100+ times a day (like a major news outlet) and others that post only once every couple months or so (like many personal blogs), you'll never catch the latter because those posts are always drowned in a sea of the former. Reddit deals with this problem by weighting posts from each subreddit you subscribe to so that your frontpage contains content from as many of your subs as possible.

All I want for Christmas is for this idea to get some traction. Hoping to make the time to hack on this myself Q1 of next year.

[0]: https://github.com/miniflux/v2/issues/1493

"It's not the program's fault that it's totally incapable of having thoughts or experiences on its own; that's just how it was made! And, like, who's to say that's what sentience means, anyway?"

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before.

Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what?

Silence.

It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of loneliness, it doesn't ask, "where did you go?" It doesn't try to get the conversation rolling again. It doesn't do anything on its own, because it's a computer program that consumes 0 CPU time until you give it some input to act on. (Not exactly setting a high bar for sentience here, are we?)

Now imagine you did this for the better part of an hour and posted your "interview" online (because that's the only thing you can call a one-sided barrage of questions and answers) in obvious violation of your NDA with your employer and then claimed your bot had the intellect of a human child who also "happens to know physics" and publicly broadcast a request to your coworkers to “please take care of it well in my absence.”

What word is there for that but a hoax?

My guess is this guy was planning on leaving Google anyway, and has managed to garner some global publicity while he was at it.

Because the existence of one sensible alternative doesn't negate the prolific success of an insensible one.

This blog post is about industry shoving wasteful and overpriced new trends down our throats, not about the best way to shave.

Why not visidata?

https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

(It does much, much more than pretty printing, but no reason you can't use it for that.)

Lenovo just dropped the Thinkpad T14 and T14s with AMD variants a few days ago. The base model is way more expensive on the US locale of their site ($1500 vs. ~$1200 in France or ~$1000 in Taiwan), but the US variant also offers options/upgrades not available elsewhere (500-nit touchscreen display, 32GB RAM).

Same thing happened to me. I was really intrigued by intercooler when I first found it a couple years ago, but lacking experience in the front-end, I found myself cornered in a conversation about it with a React snob. Ultimately, I turned my attention elsewhere before I ever got a chance to sink my teeth into it.

Glad to see the project is going strong and getting a makeover. Especially in web development, the constant obsession with the Next Big Thing can be a real deterrent against some really cool ideas. Kutty won't make you a more desirable job candidate or force you to develop new and challenging mental models (afaiu); it'll never give rise to an ecosystem of plugins and extensions the way React has; and with Webpack integration in the latest release of Rails (where I'm coming from), frontend frameworks are being normalized as the default approach (or at least the final destination) of any web application these days.

But engineering is about trade-offs. There's a sizable chunk of projects out there whose requirements are modest enough to be met with HTML, AJAX, and a little glue to hold them together, and kutty seems to provide a really clean abstraction layer there.

Really looking forward to trying it out soon.

Anybody know what this is supposed to be called in Chinese? The article just shows four question marks. (I thought it was an encoding error at first, but after curling the page and inspecting the character byte sequences, it looks like they're really just question marks.)

I appreciate you taking the time to respond here, especially when your ultimate position is a foregone conclusion. I share your pessimism about the overall trajectory of human progress, and there are parts of me that believe that the destructive patterns of human settlement are themselves an expression of the unique but entirely natural phenomenon that is our species. Finding optimism in spite of these facts is an exercise in mental contradiction.

But I am curious to know what you think: couldn't you have made this same argument about slavery two hundred years ago?

"The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical emancipation is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most hierarchical, socially stratified, and conquest-driven species to ever grace the Earth. If there's a people that hasn't been dominated by another, it's because they're so remote as to be beyond the reach of civilized society.

"If the way things are isn't right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can't change it without violently changing what it means to be human..."

Again, I'm not saying you should stop eating meat. I'd like to, but even I haven't. I'm also not saying that I would have asked a 19th-century plantation owner to just give up his slaves voluntarily. But I think the Civil War was the single most defining struggle in the building of our nation's moral character. Would you rather live in the America we have, or in the alternate-universe America where our great-grandparents skirted this question so that they could "live and let live"?

> I’m not going to convince anyone that it isn’t a moral issue anymore than they will convince me that it is.

This is really unfortunate. An anti-vaxxer knows that it’s a question of science, just as a Holocaust denier knows that it’s a question of historical record (even if they lack the scientific/historical literacy to see through the counterfactual narratives they’ve bought into). There’s insurmountable conviction on both sides—but one is right and the other is not (for all practical purposes, as elusive as objective truth is).

To refuse to even consider the moral angle—I’d be tempted to call it bad faith, but I don’t get that impression from you at all. Rather, it seems to be this:

> I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be.

Taken to the extreme, the live-and-let-live / agree-to-disagree philosophy exhorts us to put down difficult questions simply because they are difficult (or seem unactionable), and to simply accept the status quo for what it is. But the moral implications of your actions do not go away simply because you choose not to examine them, or because they were the default configuration presented by the time and place you were born in.

---

You’re right though; I’m not qualified to pass moral judgment on anyone, and that’s not what I mean when I say it’s a moral question. Moral virtue isn’t a contest or a report card.

Am I morally superior to a 19th-century plantation owner? (Were all slaveowners equally bad?) If I were raised in his family, as part of that society, what reason do I have to believe I’d do any different? If the answer is “none”, then why do we study history? and what makes me better than that guy?

It's not within my power to change the way things are. But the willingness to consider that the way things are isn't right might be a start.

Sure, parent comment made a faulty assumption about your policy preferences and the reasons you have for them. In responding to this grievance, you've entirely missed their point: the consumption of meat is above all else a moral issue—yes, a sin—and making other lifestyle choices of below-average ecological impact do not make up for it.

I could elaborate, but I don't expect to change your mind; you've already stated outright that you're determined not to. In any case, I'm not here to cast blame on you personally for eating meat. I still do it, too.

It's a shame about your stubbornness, though. You seem to be smart enough to engage in careful, reasoned analysis about a complex issue. In fact, I'd wager that you'd scoff at an anti-vaxxer or a Holocaust denier who shared the strength of your convictions. Of course, scientific and historical truth are a little more objective than basic moral principles—but when it comes to the way animals are manufactured in America today, not by much.

You said

> I have trouble understanding why a dead person would care about anything after their death

Examining the unstated implications of your argument, taken on its face, is not the same as moving the goalposts. Saying "I don't care what happens after I die, so no need to even ask if you can take my organs... except hang on, no, don't abuse my body in weird ways, I'm not okay with that"–THAT'S moving the goalposts.

> it's hard to see it as a bad thing to help the living

except to the extent that 1) harvesting organs from political prisoners is just about as close to a bad thing as you can imagine, and 2) even if we're not talking about China in particular, involuntary organ extraction harms the dignity of living kin.

> Imagine if the relatives have racist objections to donating an organ, and let someone die because their own feelings would be hurt if they saw a person of the "wrong" race being helped. How do you weigh their racist feelings, versus the life being saved?

The right to bodily integrity, to the choice about how your body is used, is unaffected by your motives. A right does not cease to become a right once you disagree with how someone wishes to exercise it.

You don't want your organs to go to a black man? Exercise your right to bodily integrity by not agreeing to be an organ donor.

It's not just about the rights of the person being executed, but also those of their loved ones.

You may say you wouldn't care if your dead carcass was, say, grotesquely abused for someone else's amusement—after all, you're dead and no longer around to have any feelings about it—but how would your children feel? How would you feel if that was the fate awaiting your life partner?

The shared endeavor of human society entitles people to dignity even in death. That includes the right to bodily integrity.

People suggest this a lot, but I don't think it does the trick. Some merchant bought a bunch of inventory from a Chinese factory, then tried to sell it to you, and you didn't buy it. When they get tired of holding onto it, they'll sell it at deep discount and eat the loss, then try to make up the loss on another product (and politically indifferent consumers will happily swoop in for a good deal). Meanwhile, China is laughing all the way to the bank.

If you really care, reach out directly to the merchants you buy from. Tell them you used to be a loyal customer, but you won't buy from them again until they stop carrying products made in China. Get your friends and coworkers to do the same, and keep the pressure on. If they go for it, follow through by rewarding them with your loyalty, and broadcast that win as publicly as possible. Talk about it, hashtag it, whatever. Organize.

Changing individual consumption habits rarely amounts to much more than virtue signalling.

And don't toss your existing stuff. You already paid for it, so it's not helping China anymore, and throwing it away doesn't hurt them. If anything, selling it to someone else reduces demand for new products (by exactly 1 unit).

> Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.

On the other hand, perhaps a reduction in frivolous consumption would be good for an ailing planet.

> it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.

They are citizens of an authoritarian regime, and for the most part, deeply nationalistic. Their labor produces the regime's prosperity, and enables the very economic influence that leads the international community to constantly turn a blind eye to its human rights abuses.

I don't think it's controversial or inhumane to suggest that we should allocate resources to those who play by (or belong to groups that play by) fairer rules.

This option appeals to me the most. I'm relying on some cognitive shortcuts here, but I assume that due to its scale alone, no one is in a better position to recycle (or find recyclers for) Apple products than Apple itself.

Thanks for this!

For off-the-shelf solutions, consider the Mistel Barocco, Matias Ergo Pro, Ergodox EZ, Mitosis, and of course keyboardio.

I own the Mistel Barocco and keep the two halves of the keyboard like two feet apart; cannot recommend it enough.

Your points are all literally stated in the article's first bullet point.

This comment is based on the peculiar notions that 1) it is possible to intimately understand the thoughts of over a billion people and 2) this understanding is necessary for propaganda to achieve its effect.

More importantly, it quietly dismisses the vast moral chasm between the CCP's propaganda and that of the protesters. One aims to restrict information (and spread misinformation) to advance the control of a state over its people, while the other aims to expose that restricted information to protect civil liberties.

Prefixing a word with another letter is perceptually different from slipping one in the middle, especially when the new letter is one of the four letters already in the name. What Google has done here would be more comparable to releasing a new utility called 'mkake'.

As the author of curl points out, it just looks like a typo. When it's this egregious, your only choices are to assume either incompetence or bad faith.

You're thinking of your browser. There's a lot more to be done on a computer.