squidlogic

My own hot take on this:

If the fundamental unit of value is provided by people, then the potential to get work done scales with the number of people engaged and ready to do it.

In a city like New York, there are a lot of talented people that are engaged in value creation. That creates an economic ecosystem that provides the potential to take an idea and bring it to value delivery with low friction.

Vibrancy, then, is the attribute where idea potential is able to reach value delivery with low friction.

This is evidenced by a lot of what the other posters have mentioned: restaurants, the arts, startups, etc. These are the result of that potential existing within the ecosystem.

When you said “yes” to flying on that airline, with checked baggage, you said yes to a chain of other sub-yeses that could result in a given situation.

Learning the consequences of your “yes” for various things and what you’re willing to accept is how you can manage this in the future.

One response from the Christian tradition is that humans are creatures made in the image of God with rational, moral, and spiritual faculties. Other animals lack these faculties. Furthermore, we are decreed to be stewards over the created order by divine command.

Argument ad hominem.

You can argue that historical actions have caused unequal outcomes, but that doesn't mean that today this decision [to make access to a park based on residence] is racist. That doesn't logically follow.

It could also be from earth.

There is scientific evidence establishing that diatoms and other microorganisms are wafted up into Earth’s upper stratosphere and beyond 25–100 km above Earth’s surface.[1] From there, passing dust particles will transport a few of these microorganisms to the upper atmosphere of Venus.

Another transport route would be large meteoroids bombarding Earth with sufficient force to export Earth rocks and soil into interplanetary space.

[1]Alexa R. Van Eaton, Margaret A. Harper, and Colin J. N. Wilson, “High-Flying Diatoms: Widespread Dispersal of Microorganisms in an Explosive Volcanic Eruption,” Geology 41, no. 11 (November 2013): 1187–90, doi:10.1130/G24829.1; Milton Wainwright et al., “Isolation of a Diatom Frustule Fragment from the Lower Stratosphere (22–27 Km)-Evidence for a Cosmic Origin,” Journal of Cosmology 2013, volume 22 (August 9, 2013): 10183–10188.

Postmodernism teaches (among many things) that truth is not objective. Rather, the epistemological center in postmodernism IS the self. Each self has its own version of truth, rather than truth being perspective-independent.

In literature, for example, this means that authorial intent is supplanted by perspectivalism. That is, each reader interprets a text based on his or her own perspective, and each interpretation is equally valid. This plays out in the political realm most prominently in the supreme court's interpretation of laws (does it matter what the author meant to say or just what we now interpret them to have said?).

So when I say it's impossible for the humanities to impose strict tests on veracity, what I mean is that a strict test would yield true results that are perspective-independent. This is what the scientific method attempts to accomplish, and the hard sciences use this methodology. The humanities, however, have long ceded that it is impossible to arrive at a perspective-independent conclusion and IMO would therefore reject a similarly rigorous approach.

Unfortunately the humanities succumbed to postmodernism long ago. Since then it has been impossible to impose strict tests on veracity as you find in hard sciences.

As I recall, Bureau of Land Management tried this and there was a lot of backlash from residents. It’s also quite a bit of land to do a controlled burn, so might not be that feasible.

Do you have a link to the data you're looking at?

This response misses the point.

Yes, it is possible for young healthy people to have complications from COVID.

The thinking must go one step further: what is the likelihood of a deleterious outcome? Is it more than the likelihood than them getting in a crash while on the way to the gym (which we do not prohibit)?

A further question: is the mitigating response impacting other outcomes that are important?

In multi-objective analysis you must consider more than just one factor to arrive at an optimal state. I fear the analysis done by many laymen in this area only considers one factor (COVID infection), and even then, considers it without nuance.

There will be a natural decoupling between our two nations. We did the same with Soviet Union when we realized their ideology left no room for long term peaceful coexistence (see the Long Telegram).

A lot of political leaders are realizing that the communism of China, while different in many ways to the Soviet variety, is still incompatible with the USA.

Sometimes known as pixel lighting, matrix systems are based around a high-beam unit consisting of a cluster of LEDs (the Audi matrix system consists of up to 25 LEDs per high-beam unit), rather than a single high-beam bulb that you might find in a conventional headlight.

This allows you to block out certain portions of the beam so you don't blind other drivers as they approach.

Originalism is alive and well. It’s revival and subsequent spread is probably the most lasting legacy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Isn’t that what the brave browser is trying to solve?

According to this site [0], there actually has been a dip. Here's an excerpt, draw your own conclusions:

"Essentially, with access to a more granular data set than had been publicly available, the economists could see that growth in manufacturing over the decades was almost entirely a result of statistical adjustments for improvement in semiconductor performance."

[0] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/manufacturing-job-loss...

Low inventory is also worth it because it uncovers operational inefficiencies. So it not only helps you become more profitable, but also more reliable.

(author here) I've used SimpleWebRTC[0] in the past with success. It was helpful once I needed to start dealing with the annoyances of cross browser compatibility, multiparty calls, etc. You can also fork their code on github[1], which is what I ended up doing.

[0] https://simplewebrtc.com/

[1] https://github.com/andyet/SimpleWebRTC

Amazing write-up. Informative and gripping in its prose.

Let's not forget the very real possibility of death when cycling on a US road. You are completely at the mercy of the auto. In most cities dedicated bike lanes with any barriers or protection are very rare.

Not OP so I can't say what is meant by "happiness" here, but maybe if you feel your life can serve a purpose other than your own pleasure/comfort you would be willing to experience less pleasure/comfort to achieve that goal. That's different than happiness, but maybe that's what he/she was getting at.

Norway and the US are very different in terms of size, diversity, economic output, geography ... pretty much everything. Saying that something works for Norway isn't really a good reason to adopt it in the US.

This seems to be a much more apt analogy for most startups:

Rather than being pushed off a cliff and asked to build a rocket, they are being strapped to the rocket (of VC funding) and asked to make it to the moon.

Not to diminish the hard work that goes into building a successful startup. Not all rockets make it to the moon, as the difficulty of a moon shot isn't really in generating thrust, but thrust is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient condition.

Until people search things at alphabet.com instead of google.com I suspect you will be fighting an uphill battle to change this particular bit of terminology.

Positivism has fallen out of favor precisely because it cannot withstand its own criteria for meaning.

For example, the statement that "all true statements can be determined empirically" is not itself verifiable by empirical means.

Good luck to them.

After helping make a slack-style client-side encrypted productivity app (https://balboa.io) that has been on life-support for the last 2 months, I have a lot of respect for people that attempt to make this space more secure.

It's not easy.

A few lessons learned that may be useful to others:

1. Most businesses and consumers are ok with their data being available to companies like Slack and Google because they trust these companies. They feel that regardless of reality, their data is safer with Google or Slack because those companies have a lot more to lose if they fail.

2. The SME space for productivity apps is pretty much the same as the consumer space. You're going to be competing with Google. SMEs are actually really cheap and scrappy: they don’t spend money on non-bottom line affecting stuff. If you want to sell security to them, it has to be essentially free

3. Reputation is more important than (or at least AS important as) your technical chops. You're asking people to trust you. You can show that you are competent by demonstrating a mastery of the technology, but that may not be enough to show that you are also trustworthy.

In the mid-90s it was a place for upper middle class kids to go party. The riots wiped that out.

In the late-00s it became a place for upper middle class kids to live. Largely do to the efforts of 3CDC. Lot of money being spent to renovate those older buildings.

Sometimes that fear can be a good thing. It means you are trying to do things just outside of your comfort zone, which can help you grow. If you are always 100% confident that you can do something, then that means you may be at a plateau in your personal growth. Run towards the fear.

Some specific advice that might be useful...

Bring in other people to your projects. It helps vet the idea, gives you someone to lean on if you're having an off day, and it is a huge intangible 'good' to know that you're in it with someone else. I'm reminded of a GK Chesterton quote, "It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one."

Second, bite off as small a chunk as you can at a time. Not just in terms of features, but break your work down into one or two hour tasks. Sometimes this is not possible, but more often that not it is. Write all of these small tasks down. As you finish one, cross it off. At the end of an 8 hr day of work, even if you have no user-facing features to show for it, you will have a sense of accomplishment over these 4-8 tasks that you were able to finish. This can help act as a positive motivator to push forward.

Good luck!

The article doesn't seem to go into the actual physics too much. It instead links to a blog post [0] and another article [1] that go into more detail. I recommend reading these over the gizmodo one.

[0] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/p...

[1] http://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/physics-of-curlin...

Hmm ... I think you could make a stronger point if you had used the example of the brand of Islam espoused by Islamic terrorists in the US vs. Falun Gong in China. Both are religions or at least quasi-religions, both are hunted and suppressed by the state.

I think it's clear that the state in the US and China go about this task differently, and fundamentally I think it's because in the US the state recognizes rights but in China the state bestows rights.

For example, even though religious liberty is a recognized right enshrined in the constitution, it can, and is, overridden on occasion if the state has a "legitimate public concern."

In China, there is no need to dance around the issue of liberty or define what constitutes "legitimate public concern." The state can, and does, simply act.

But more practically, in the US you usually have some recourse that is built into the system of governance.

The US separates the state's powers (executive, legislative, and judicial) to allow for some recourse. So, if the executive branch makes a decision to override religious liberty in favor of what it deems to be "legitimate public concern," it has to defend its interpretation and balance of the competing rights claims in (at least) 1) the court (defending its interpretation of a law or use of executive order) and 2) the public square (else the next election cycle can oust the current party).

China, on the other hand, doesn't need to consult its citizens or worry too much about their opinion (unless it acts so egregiously that it causes violent revolt). There are no liberties unless the state gives them to you, so unwarranted imprisonment, torture, and summary execution are all permitted. Guantanamo Bay style prison/camps are the norm and the public has no recourse.