snakeboy

It is nice, however, when it's an option at a bar and you can have something kind of like a beer, while not incurring the usual "What, just a water?" conversations.

How about those at the margin? I'd guess most policy proposals don't seem productive when you condense a population down to a scalar "model" subject and ask if he would change his behavior in light of the new policy. That doesn't mean that population-level effects won't be observed.

> When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.

Sounds like we are in need of some voting-reform voting reforms!

I suspect the people who are "virtually guaranteed" to need payouts are a small population compared to the majority of people that live somewhere in the gray zone between the two extremes.

Then, to quantify the people in that gray zone, it becomes a question of which variables to we include? Sure, alcohol is bad, and junk food is bad. But what is junk food precisely? And if you run ultra-marathons, it surely doesn't matter as much. If you live in a city with higher pollution, if you drive a cheaper older car with a worse safety rating, if you work two jobs and thus have higher stress levels, on and on.

And if we're talking about social healthcare, do you really want a faceless bureaucracy to be tasked with calculating those risks and putting a price on all your life choices?

Well the hotel has [countably] infinite-many rooms, so the nth guest moves to room n+1.

In general, floating point error can accumulate in iterative algorithms where you are feeding the result of one calculation into the next step.

I didn't say it harms scientists. I said this example doesn't progress science. Curious laypersons are well and good. I would recommend they start by reading the linked Quanta article :)

I wonder which political variable could have left office between then and now to explain that?

Yes, but speculation about the most obvious questions from someone who hasn't done any work to investigate whether it's already been addressed doesn't progress science either.

Here's the 2nd paragraph from the linked article (which is already a source someone created to help non-experts understand the main ideas):

> It isn’t surprising, then, that herrings and smelts, two groups of fish that commonly roam the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, both make AFPs. But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene — particularly since their ancestors diverged more than 250 million years ago and the gene is absent from all the other fish species related to them.

edit: I am more sympathetic to this behavior when the topic is more politically contentious, since it may be unreasonably difficult for a layman to know the biases of the authors and the source may indeed be trying to slide something under the rug. But here we're talking about fish genetics. There's no culture war or red vs. blue divide here (I hope!)

> interest/resources/profits

It doesn't seem like Microsoft should have any of these issues. At most "interest", but even that should be a pretty easy sell for a service as massive as github.

Personally, I do - but I accept that the commonly-held definition has shifted to diverge from mine in the last few years. I don't think "bigotry" has had that shift.

For example, I think "naive" is a similar word in that it necessarily implies a characterization of the person beyond the action itself.

Good video, and you have a fair point. Thanks for sharing. I guess my real issue with the OP's language is that "bigotry" is a pretty charged term that necessarily crosses into a "who they are" conversation.

So if in your opinion the designer is both racist and a bigot, why do you hold back from calling them a "racist bigot" ?

To be fair, the article is tagged "racism", and you explicitly refer to the design as "bigotry".

> They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary.

I understand that this is an accepted definition for racism these days. But bigotry still implies intent, doesn't it? 'Rude', as you put it later on, seems like a reasonable description, but I'm not really seeing any 'bigotry'.

How about providing infrastructure, a stable economy, peaceful society, etc. ?

The internal monitoring and codified repercussions also grow at the same time, I'd hope..

Agreed on curfews. The police effectively corral all the aperos and picnics from open-air parks into tiny overcrowded apartments every evening.

Though the French government has already announced plans to gradually lift restrictions throughout May and June. No telling if they'll stick to it though :)

In France it's currently illegal to go outside after 7pm, all gyms, museums, cinemas are closed, and all restaurants and bars are take-out only (not even outdoor dining). Of course a mask mandate indoors and outdoors, but I agree that's not a huge inconvenience relative to the others...

Those are just the restrictions actively enforced. Technically one can't go more than 10 km from their house, but I'm not sure how much that's really enforced.

Was Michael Lewis personally calling Trump's response racist and xenophobic? If not, then what does that have to do with what Michael Lewis has to say now?

> Sometimes people and ideas and practices are simply wrong.

Of course, and I agree with you on this particular issue. All I mean is that if we can act today to chip away at the problem rather than just talking about the ideals, that's good, and in a democracy, that's what we accept as we work towards the ideal.

> It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause when the process itself should be eliminated.

Life's too short, I'm happy to celebrate progress. I'm proud to see the end of it in my home state of Virginia this year, even if it's not nationally outlawed.

You can laugh all you want, but killing fewer innocent people is in fact a good thing. If you can't see the value in that, then politics is not for you :)

I think we should celebrate that kind of incremental progress so long as it's not progress towards some kind of inescapable local minimum. And even in that case, it just becomes more complicated, not obviously wrong either.

That's called a compromise, right? Reducing the pain involved and increasing the burden of proof required are both concrete, positive reforms, even if it doesn't completely resolve the issue.

Setting the clock BPM to minimum sets a calm working pace, more like a video game soundtrack or something. Awesome project!

Those who add irrelevant comments trying to shame people for using popular, harmless slang aren't admirable people either.

(Neither are the schmucks like me who are baited into responding, but whatever)

Wow, I had never heard of the 2014 case in Peru[0]. from the article:

> Global Witness has said 164 environmentalists were killed worldwide in 2018. About half were killed in Latin American countries including Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Guatemala.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/peru-logging-i...

If we're just choosing our personal favorite countries, we can also discuss France, who is still in lockdown (albeit weakened) with ~1450 deaths pM. :)

> The data couldn't be more clear

I don't mean to be rude, so please take this as an honest, albeit blunt, response. No one who is honestly analyzing this situation is making such a strong statement. Be them epidemiologists, statisticians, or independent analysts. The only ones saying this are politicians whose job depend on proving that their strategy works.

I would really encourage you to have a bit more humility at the complexity of this problem and the variables (and messy data) involved and the fact that we're still actively learning more every day about the effectiveness of different policy strategies.

Both the EU average deaths pM and Sweden deaths pM are pretty similar, around 1300.

I'm not sure why you consider Belgium cherry-picking but not Norway, Germany, and Finland.

You could make an argument for Finland and Norway as more culturally similar (even if personally I find this logic suspect for explaining Covid outcomes), but I don't see how, between Germany and Belgium, one is obviously better than the other for comparison. It appears you chose a country that fits your narrative, and them, theirs.

Why doesn't this reach a better equilibrium though? Consider store A who brags about disinfecting everything every half hour, and store B down the street who does the bare minimum to pass government regulations.

Shouldn't store B then be spending less money on "sanitary theatre" and can theoretically provide a marginally better service in ways that matter?

The federal government can spend however many billions of dollars for new TSA staffing and equipment, but that's because they're a monopoly in airline security. Not sure why in a free-market we'd have obviously sub-optimal outcomes like this.

(Sorry if this is naive, feel free to weigh in with harsh realities about how the real world works :) )

Probably better to give them a placebo vaccine so we don't waste the good stuff ;)

As this is a purely creative endeavor, it's your prerogative to turn those feelings into inspiration for your own attempt - nothing sad about it :)