snakeboy

I don't know him, so I took a quick look. It looks like he was against some of the mandatory COVID measures. I don't really understand the point of you trying to call out his politics here. It's not the topic at-hand, and his views are hardly outside the mainstream, and at a first glance don't seem to be hateful or bigoted. So can't we just stick to the topic, and agree to disagree instead of trying to wholesale imply this guy holds "sus" (i.e. "not acceptable") views?

>...roads already exist and maintenance is extremely cheap. It’s paid for with gasoline taxes.

According to [0] no state derives more than 71% of its "State & Local Road Spending" from gas taxes. Unclear to me what proportion of the spending is maintenance though.

The best number I could find for maintenance cost was [1], which says in 2015, the average per-mile maintenance cause of US roads is $28,020.

Can anyone help find a comparable figure for rail maintenance?

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ [1] https://azmag.gov/Portals/0/Documents-Ext/FLCP/Roadway-Maint...

Try-hard edgy energy here. Just enjoy the day off dude.

We're talking about postdocs though, which is a completely different population than college students. I found this [1] which estimates that 51% of US postdocs are foreign-born as of 2018.

[1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/40189

Note the first in the saga is Au Bonheur des Ogres[1], or The Scapegoat in the English edition.

[1] https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/pennacd/scapeg.htm

I'd argue that usually the neighbors are people entirely removed from the skate boarding debate one way or the other. They just don't want excessive noise pollution outside their apartment (be it from skateboarders, mopeds, neighbors with bass-heavy stereos, etc.)

> and will always vote Republican

I'm not sure I would go that far. I can easily imagine a situation where the Republican party pulls out all the stops and ensures Trump doesn't win the nomination, only for Trump to run on the MAGA party ticket. I would expect him to easily get 10% of the vote.

We didn't get any democrats who really dared test this on the left in 2020, as even Bernie (the strongest cult of personality on the left, for comparison) fell in line behind Biden.

That is to say, strong personalities, more than institutions, seem to carry the most power. Perhaps this has always been true? How much of mass media's historical confidence was due solely to Walter Kronkite?

According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who trust mass media a "great deal" or a "fair amount" dropped 10 percentage points during the Iraq war, and then never fully recovered.

Of course, broken down by political party shows Democrats have restored their trust in mass media just fine, especially since Trump...

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...

I haven't watched this video yet, but this channel "Soft White Underbelly" has some really incredible content especially around drug addiction in the US. Has helped me to humanize the headlines we see about the "opioid crisis" in recent years.

Perhaps it is still repeated since it's a good point.

Although my impression is that most of the anti-woke bloggers/podcasters are hucksters looking to ride the polemic for fame and money rather than intellectually-interested in freedom of the press.

Usually platonic roommates are less willing to share a one-bedroom, much less a studio.

Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?

> Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?

Huh? You assume the vaccines cause heart issues, and use as evidence for concluding that vaccines cause heart issues...? Did I misunderstand?

I don't really have an opinion here since I haven't looked at any of the data you're referencing.

Moreover, this is straying from my initial point, which was that opioid addiction is life-destroying on an scale far beyond what we have yet seen from vaccines, and it doesn't even require any careful study to see that since the effect size is so huge, with explicit societal harm in the form of drug trafficking, crime, and overdose deaths.

Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is.

Pushing vaccines is mostly just profiting by adding another layer of bureaucracy and annoyance into daily life.

I'm not really more angry at pfizer than I am Booz Allen for wasting however many billions of my tax dollars.

It's also relatively standard practice in the US. Of course it's illegal "by the books" just like in France and some parts of the UK. At worst you'd probably get a fine if you get caught in a densely populated urban environment without a good reason.

It's incredibly misleading to say that peeing on the side of the road in an emergency could put you on the sex offenders' registry.

I'd be interested in an example of someone getting on the registry for public peeing without egregious extenuating circumstances (repeated offence next to a daycare, or something)

Wow, I had never seen that before. What a bizarre video with a forced tie-in of the whole manifest destiny idea with lunar missions (1976).

It seems to completely ignore the reality of communities and society (and history, for that matter) for an unquestioning expansion of our domain, all wrapped up in this patronizing metaphor about needing "elbow room".

These goals seem to me like progress towards a life well-lived. Good luck!

17 year olds are known to not always act in their long-term rational self-interest.

It feels wrong to me to group "consume" and "travel" together. Travel is legitimately a positive force for exposing people to new cultures, ideas, and wealth sharing, which in turn strengthens the global community. Of course, to your point, some people just want to go to a private resort with other tourists and sit on a beach.

> if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more

I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities, especially when a lot of that movement is to escape local political inability/poverty/etc.

I agree largely with your point, particularly about "consumption" and that we get used to convenience and leisure, but I think travel is a totally different beast and should be treated with more nuance.

I've heard some positive reviews about gather.town[0] for virtual co-working, though I've never used it. The demos look cool though. It lacks the creative element of Minecraft though. I'm not sure to what extend the worlds are customizable. Curious if anyone has used it and has an opinion.

I've tried FocusMate, though that is along the "match-making" model, and I didn't get much out of a random pairing for 1 hour at a time.

[0] https://www.gather.town/

I'm all for hating on Ajit, but from a cursory look at the prison case, the FCC just never really had the jurisdiction to regulate intrastate calls and repeatedly lost in court on that question. There was already a 50 cent cap on interstate calls under Pai, and this year under Rosenworcel it's been lowered to 14-21 cents[1].

Am I missing something?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/ajit-pai-urges-s...

[1] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2021/sep/1/fcc-takes-fu...

I don't think "eponymous" is the word you meant there.

How did he deserve it exactly? They were being snarky, sure, but population-wide infection hospitalization rate is estimated around 2-3%, so yes, the vast majority of Covid cases were mild. That's not even a controversial statement.

Good thinking. When I cancelled it (No complaints, I just did one of the 12 week offers as it's too expensive for me in general) they made me go talk to a sales person in their chat room, and they actually put me on hold for ~20 minutes while waiting for the queue to clear. Then they try to sell you on a reduced rate before they'll let you cancel. C'est abusé.

I've spent a lot of time interviewing data scientists for an entry-level position lately, and it's pretty shocking to hear them describe their master's "capstone project", which often consists of a group project with some pre-cleaned data. A few calls to sklearn later, bam, an M.S.

He's exaggerating (or maybe it's the case at UCSB), since it's usually only true for first year undergraduate (among "traditional" students starting right high school. I think older students usually live off campus). As for relationships, most people end their high school relationship before college, or the two go to a different college, so it's long distance.

I actually found it formative to be forced to share that space and resolve (inevitable) tensions that arise. And since it's usually randomized, you end up with someone you might not have normally met. Of course some people have bad experiences, and can request re-assignment.

And 90% of Twitter's problems would be solved if they weren't trying to be maximally "useful" to every single person on earth all the time.

10 hours was just an arbitrary number, but there are plenty of more creative solutions. Shut down every March, or Weekday mornings, or every other hour.

Your example which is why everyone in this thread has been bending over backwards to emphasize that certain services (like medical ones) should aim for full reliability.

Suppose twitter/reddit/HN shut down for 10 hours a day.

> And we see that it clearly has a very negative impact overall so idk what kind of argument is that.

You're talking about AC? Surely the climate dialogue hasn't devolved to the point of "uses energy == bad". We can reflect on its role in shaping society/living spaces and its costs and benefits without being so reductionist.

The marginal cost is basically zero per additional public transit user, no? If a city bus runs every 15 minutes, the ridership volume changes nothing up until some critical point is reached where another bus gets added to that route, or a new route is added.