snakeboy

Exactly, it has been refined over millennia.

> It is deeply disturbing to me that there are people with these types of views.

Just friendly advice: you're never going to have a meaningful discussion or a productive debate if that's how you treat a differing opinion.

You're correct, I should have been more precise. 4.5 years lost all at once is what is unacceptable. I recognize work and all of life's "chores" take time, and that every decision I make cuts off an infinitude of other choices. Though most chores have a positive reward for doing them, while prison has very little.

The larger point I intended was that for most people (especially handsomely-paid professionals like software devs) time is a more constrained resource than money.

Lastly, time lost all at once is worse than time loss incrementally, i.e. if I could serve my 4.5 year sentence 40 hours a week, that doesn't sound so bad, or that unfamiliar... ;)

Discussing the length of a prison sentence strictly in terms of income lost is also greatly understating the actual severity of the punishment.

I would gladly give up say 10% of my lifetime earnings for all sorts of things, but I wouldn't trade 4.5 years of my healthy adult life for anything.

Reminds me of a touching moment in Before Sunrise.

I'm in total agreement with you. My response was a criticism of those who sit idly by and collect their massive paycheck, and perhaps signing an open letter from time to time to sleep better at night. It's just paying lip service to the cause.

No, but I'm not at the point where I'm signing an open letter to condemn my employer for something. However if you are at that point, you may at least consider that you should be working elsewhere.

This kind of analysis reminds me of the classic SSC post, "The Pyramid And The Garden" https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga...

I don't think the OP was at all suggesting that it's a good system. They were just explaining the current incentive structure.

If you didn't receive the check, there will be a section on your 2020 1040 tax form for "Recovery Rebate Credit" which seems to be the catch-all for anyone who missed the deadlines or didn't get their full amount for whatever reason.

I'm an American overseas who pays his taxes, has intent to return, yada yada and never received my check, and never got the online portal to recognize me, so I'm hoping this will work.

Source: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/economic-impact-payment-informa...

> even though there has been obvious bias in all mainstream reporting for over a decade

Fortunately we're getting into this really interesting era where I don't have to waste my time with their bullshit, nor with yours. Cheers.

The citation for gunshot wound victims being counted as Covid deaths says it was 5 deaths, and it was only on the publicly-available dashboard to track deaths. Not being used for official reporting purposes. In my opinion it's kind of dishonest how you present that.

I'll admit it made me lose interest in reading much further because I don't trust you to have used the other 42 citations in good faith.

Anyway, that was just meant as constructive criticism. Just something to keep in mind in your writing in the future.

Okay, interesting - good luck! (I guess it would have been reasonable for me to have assumed you two have a particular situation and I could've avoided my snarky question :) )

Wouldn't your parents presumably be at much higher risk than you? It seems like the roles should be reversed, no?

At least until recently, there was no money backing it. Support for unpopular policies is presumably backed by rich corporations, right? I'm thinking relaxing environmental regulations and war as two examples that come immediately to mind.

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

I have the impression that a dev workflow resembles: 1. Editing code locally 2. Running expensive computation on a remote compute/database server

Creatives need to edit massive complex files with sophisticated real-time simulation of their contents.

Devs are editing text files...

I assume it has to be aluminum since the weight is going to be a big factor in the efficiency, no ?

> if it's large and/or has been around for a long time

So why not work for a smaller company with values and a history that you can respect?

You make it sound like in a capitalist society we have to sell our souls to a big evil company. Software developers (especially ones have the skills to work for facebook) can work literally anywhere. Lots of them start their own companies. There's simply no excuse for contributing to the success of companies whose values and actions you can't personally endorse and stand behind.

Of course I'm not gonna resent some dude working at McDonalds for contributing to the obesity epidemic, but software developers just don't have any excuse.

Sorry, i skimmed the page but don't see the relevant statistic. They're talking about lifetime risk, not per-encounter risk, no?

Granted, i totally just grabbed the two numbers and divided so it's possible it was a bad source.

Fortunately in the US, 99.998% of police encounters don't result in a death.

I imagine the statistics are hard to get accurately (a rich person who never gets arrested isn't going to be counted as a drug user unless the study is done via survey), but is it really true that a poor person is just as likely to take drugs as a rich person? Intuitively it doesn't seem quite right, and it's hard to be rich if you are addicted to something truly destructive.

I believe here "bijective" is being used with the implicit assumption that we're talking about the same finite sets, "byte-strings up to a fixed length". From the link on BiCom:

> compression with bicom is completely bijective -- any file is a possible bicom output that can be decompressed, and then recompressed back to its original form.

To be fair, as has been discussed elsewhere in this thread (and my own personal experience) was that it opened up this kind of marketplace to a lot of people who weren't buying these kinds of drugs before, due to precisely the risks you mention.

I guess there probably aren't too many statistics about the users of Silk Road though - so I'm not sure I can back up that claim. :)

Additionally, within the scope of any one field or sub-field, you get a nice constant-factor boost by exploiting capital/lowercase, italics, bold-face, "chalkboard" font, etc. and usually that suffices. Anyone who has taken a linear algebra course instantly recognizes what I mean by "Solve Ax = b" in the appropriate context. And if I say "Solve Qx = b" you have even more information, etc.

Personally, I find they're two tangential, but distinct goals. I use anki for things I want to be able to recall instantaneously, like a foreign language, and I use markdown notes for general reference of media/knowledge I've come across, to record my fresh understanding for later. I don't need these memorized- just an easy reference.

Let's not even get started on abortion...

Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well.

That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.

As someone with only a basic knowledge of FEA, why would a quadrilateral mesh ever make more sense than triangular?

To be fair, I suspect "coding related searches" are easy for any search engine, given

1. the immense online/open-source nature of the profession: every blog/forum question and answer/documentation since the origin of the profession being in plain-text and mostly publicly accessible by default

2. and it all revolves around a precise, limited vocabulary.

This point is explicitly discussed in TFA. Kind of bad faith to criticize an article so harshly that you didn't even bother to skim...