telchior

Criticisms aside, not having an author byline is an intentional thing the Economist has done since its founding. The article tag that you're correctly pointing out is haughty is also standard for them; they're haughty about everything, not just foreign countries.

I don't think this is a bad thing. Even an "obvious" message will have a large percent of viewers who don't get it. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're idiots, as other comments imply: they might be ESL speakers, not from the same culture as the message, children, distracted, neurodivergent, or just... didn't get it. A top explainer comment is also very helpful for people who don't want to commit to watching / reading yet.

I'm all about being elitist but shaming "signposting of basic meaning" doesn't make sense to me. Signposts are great.

> They’re using oil being converted to electric energy

Classic conservative talking point. The next bit after this is "let's do nothing, gas burning cars are the future!". Anyone who actually wants to think for real about what the energy usage of an electric vehicle in their area is can refer to the EPA's Power Profiler: https://www.epa.gov/egrid/power-profiler#/

If you're in California, about half is gas. The other half is primarily nuclear, solar, wind and hydro. Transmission losses from power plant to home, and home to charged battery, are 10-20%; but then, electric drivetrains lose much less to efficiency than gas drivetrains. At the end of the day, emissions from driving an electric are better pretty much anywhere in the world; and in most places, massively better.

I think saying that electric "has the potential to become renewable" is quite reasonable. It'll certainly take a lot of time and isn't a certainty, but the generation mix is probably, all in all, an easier problem than the emissions from manufacturing batteries.

Medical device prices are typically nosebleed high, so a $70 pair of glasses really doesn't strike me as being expensive at all, relative to other devices, even if it only cost them $10 to make. A device mentioned in a different thread recently, that looked like it might be very helpful to me, was $4000 for about $50 (at most) of components.

When people say "early" they can mean very different things, it's not really useful for gauging your actual risk.

Check a yearly UV index for your area. There are times of day that are completely safe for your skin type; but typically those times are quite early / late, like before 8am and after 4pm. UV tends to rise quite sharply in the morning, so while it might be a 2 or 3 at 8am it could be 5 or 6 at 9am (enough to burn your skin type).

This is neat, I'm going to try using it on some searches tonight. I have two pieces of immediate feedback:

- I need a date range option. I'm searching for something about a piece of software and getting answers from around 2011, so far out of date that it's useless.

- Really need some padding on the left side of the page ;)

Yeah, but penalizing people based on metadata or keyword lists is incredibly easy. Compare that to trying to figure out which recipe site is keyword stuffing vs which happens to have a story by someone who really did journey to Tuscany to learn the perfect cacciucco recipe.

Sometimes I've fantasized about Google having human editorial that would evaluate these content farms as they grow and make the nuanced decisions of which to derank. But then, if they really did that, they'd get sued or regulated pretty quickly.

I feel weird arguing for Google's side since I actually do have a lot of criticisms and generally dislike Google search. I just think this content farm issue looks very thorny; humans are built to deceive each other and at some point of sophistication that gets very difficult to control.

This kind of problem isn't just because of search, it's also because of content creators. I believe what all content creators quickly learn is, on any given topic, the funnel is extremely wide on the most introductory knowledge and then becomes uselessly narrow as you drill into specific info.

To use a specific example, the other day I was trying to learn more about programming shaders. There is an unending number of basic level tutorials: what is a shader? There are probably 500,000 people searching for that topic. But if I want to figure out a UV scrolling texture, I'm screwed, there's almost nothing. Because the audience for that is maybe 500 people.

There's just no financial (or even reputational!) incentive for anyone to write an article / make a video on something requiring deeper expertise. There is stuff out there, of course, created by the tiny minority of passionate enthusiasts or dedicated professionals. Google is really searching for a needle in a very, very large haystack. And I think Google (and other search) has been more and more challenged by that over the years as the internet moved from a niche enthusiast place to a mass market place. Particularly when all the hay is spending massive amounts of effort on trying to pretend to be a needle.

tl;dr I despise using Google (or DuckDuckGo) these days but I don't think all the blame should be assigned to the engines, they're actually facing a tough problem. (Not that you personally were saying that, but this is mainly a thread of hating on Google.)

> Nicotine gum won't ever replace cigarettes, nor will people who don't smoke start chewing it.

There are non-smokers who use nicotine gum; I'm one of them. Similar effect to caffeine with a lower half-life, so it's suitable to have later in the day. I'm sure that we're a small group, but if nicotine didn't have the specter of cigarettes hanging behind it, I'd imagine it could be quite a large market.

Plant-based meat is sort of the opposite. Real meat has the specter behind it, so there's a good funnel of people into the product. Furthermore, any kind of taste that's above "edible" eventually gets people acclimated; they expect and learn to enjoy it. I can't prove that on an individual basis, but the plant-based meat market is growing at a healthy clip and has been around for several years, which suggests a lot of repeat buyers. You'd have to provide some kind of evidence to say "eventually they'll graduate", as there's no indication of that so far.

WolframAlpha has a niche use case and rather steep requirements for learning how it wants things to be asked. Also there's a ton of stuff it just can't parse in any format. It can tell you how long to cook an egg (I think) [edit: just checked, it tells you how long to cook ham instead...] but can't tell you any kind of egg recipe.

IMO what you're reading here is just lengthy advertisement for WolframAlpha, written by the guy who created WolframAlpha and named it after himself. The simple queries he's suggesting that WA should be used for aren't even really WA's use case (at least, I've never met anyone who'd bother going to WA to ask it about distance between two cities; Google does this just fine). His argument could be summed up as saying that ChatGPT should just use any legacy search engine to find numerical results and encase the answer in natural language.

I've always enjoyed drinking hot coffee / tea on hot days, and found out this is a sort of tradition for some people (e.g. kopi in Singapore). Supposedly, it cools you down by kickstarting your sweat, but for me it also makes me feel instantly clearheaded (whereas the caffeine high takes 30ish minutes).

Maybe some of us need that kind of stimulation just to feel fully awake. I'm a generally lethargic person, and in that state I can't really think clearly. A little shock to the central (or sympathetic?) nervous system helps counteract that and get the ideas or work flowing.

Cellphones are perfect for this. For maximum effect, hold it above your face while falling asleep.

(Only semi-joking, I've done this multiple times.)

I've always been interested in trying skateboarding, but my balance is absolutely miserable (due to a vestibular injury), so I sort of just know better than to try. Balance declines for a lot of people naturally with age, so that's one reason you might not see fogies on skateboards.

These shoes look more doable to me. I can't help thinking they're still not really a great idea for anyone with balance / reaction speed / other issues, though. Slamming into a wall or nearly falling while at normal walking speed isn't a big deal, but doubling the speed changes the equation.

Another issue is the desire to appear dignified... tough to do on a skateboard. Nigh-on impossible on a Segway. These shoes? Not sure, but they do look a bit silly.

Instead of thinking in terms of "everything", "everyone", etc, it may help to think in terms of bell curves and outliers on that curve.

Would you be willing to believe that, out of 7+ billions people in the world, there is at least one person whose brain is set up to constantly hammer them with feelings of hunger? (I'm not sure how a basic proposition like this could be rejected, since the chemicals and processes that govern hunger are something that science actually has some understanding of, and we also know that basically anything can go haywire.)

Next: if you can believe that one person is such an outlier, can you believe that hundreds are? Thousands? Millions? Whatever size that group is, it seems like a possible answer to your worry of when these lines of thinking stop. Perhaps some outlying group of people do actually need something more than "good old fashioned hard work and discipline", especially considering that thousands of years of people repeating such sentiments hasn't solved quite a lot of problems (beyond just obesity).

Seemed clear to me what they mean: assign full blame to management. The blameless part is for engineers.

> Southwest has many highly technical developers, cloud architects, Site Reliability Engineers and DevOps Engineers, so talent at the engineering level is not a problem. It is the non-technical senior and middle management (particularly the ones who have tenure) in the Technology Services and Operations department that destroy any chance to implement best practices..

then

> Create a blameless culture that allows engineers to...

It would be quite ironic if this post really is from a senior engineer and this is the most granular they can get about the issues. Maybe it really is the engineers who need to be blamed! (But probably not.)

I'm really curious about this viewpoint. Can you point to a couple specific items in the Twitter Files that you find to be terrifying? I've taken a look -- definitely not a thorough reading -- of the Files and nothing particularly struck me. The Biden laptop stuff is the bit I'm somewhat leery of, but it looks arguable given the context from 2016.

And if the Twitter Files really do reveal terrifying information, how does Musk come off as likeable? The two viewpoints seem mutually exclusive: Musk is the same guy who began banning users for both petty personal and politically partisan reasons (ElonJet, people who criticized him like Paul Graham, journalists that he views as liberal mouthpieces). Is it good and positive because... he does it in the open?

FWIW "regular criminals" routinely get bail. Even murder suspects do; around half of them. Despite that, there are some obvious issues with cash bail, which is why bail reform is a major area of legislation in some places. Several states have recently switched from cash bail to a points system.

That points system seems like an infinitely better idea than advocating that shitty conditions and mistreatment be applied evenly across all people. Presumption of innocence, right? No matter what we all think, SBF has not been proven -- in the way that matters -- to have broken the law.

In my experience, having spent some years as a professional writer with a bunch of colleagues, every writer comes with their own distinctive flaws. In terms of output, for some people getting words out is like juicing a stone. For others, the words flow freely but the juice is bad.

In fact, the single most productive writer I worked with was also the absolute worst to read on a word-by-word basis. He was also one of the most successful in his career. The trick was combing through his masses of thought-assault to identify out the good bits and fix the mediocre bits (obviously, throwing away the bad bits). I always got a chuckle out of how the end readers had no idea how much of the original writing was schlock, but his success was fully deserved on many other levels.

So in short: recognize that what you're experiencing is totally normal and acceptable, and work to your strengths. Write your crappy stuff that nobody wants to read and then fix it. If you can't fix it -- then editing is what you need to work hard on improving (and editing ≠ writing).

I agree that what's being attempted is pretty implausible, but you're comparing it to people pursuing perpetual motion, which is in direct contravention of physical laws.

A better comparison might be people pursuing fusion for power generation -- something known to be possible, albeit potentially beyond human capabilities either now or in the future.

You're probably right, not sure how old you are but growers kept selectively breeding solely for appearance up to (I think) the 2010s.

Probably much more important than chivalry: you can't ransom off a captive who is dead.

Ransoms were really, really large in that period. Five years after this battle, the English captured the French king at Poitiers. His ransom was 4 million gold coins plus, I think, various concessions. The French ended up having to pay a lot of ransoms through the whole war, and as a result, the nobility and crown were so poor they couldn't prevent banditry and famines.

Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a very engaging account of this period.

I think modern medical ethics demands a physical treatment for literally everything and anything that's discovered, including quite a few that either aren't physically dangerous (e.g. atypical brains) or are inevitable (a 90+ year old with a laundry list of conditions). And, as other comments have pointed out, a panicked surgical response to a mammogram isn't based on time series data.

I totally understand and agree with trusting that medical professionals "know better", but I also would not conflate current practices with absolute perfection. It's clearly not a perfect profession or practice.

Isn't the danger of knowing there's something weird there caused by the rarity of knowing anything at all?

I'd imagine that if there was consistent, good information available, we'd figure out how and when to act on it. The real issue is the massive cost of performing any given scanning procedure to everyone alive.

Oh, sure, you can easily build your own propane pilot light to release a bit of CO2 indoors and it'll very likely be perfectly safe. But I don't think you could sell it to other people.

Most of those "mosquito" capture devices that use UV are very effective at killing everything else except for mosquitoes. Including a lot of stuff that probably shouldn't be killed.

I've been playing with the idea of an indoor mosquito capture device, so this study is interesting to me on a number of levels. (In case you're wondering why this would be any more difficult than outdoor capture: almost all of these devices burn propane or similar to generate the CO2, making them dangerous for indoor use.)

Here's a study from 2014, linked in the paper, where they edited out the ability to sense CO2; the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes could still home in on people: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00155-X

Most mosquito capture devices are just CO2 + heat; some are CO2 + heat + odor. I haven't seen one so far that just combines heat + odor, although maybe there's something out there.

Different species of mosquito are attracted to different chemicals, which helps explain why some people get targeted a lot and others not so much. Here's a random fact I just learned from another of the linked studies: Ae. aegypti are attracted to ammonia. I guess the variability helps complicate making a general-purpose machine that will work anywhere.

Also, some species prefer humans over other animals... I think they can still get confused, though. For instance, when I'm hanging out with my black cat, the mosquitoes all gravitate to him. The study suggests that mosquito sensory cues diminish with distance (duh, I guess), but perhaps some cues become predominant as the mosquitoes get closer. I've wondered if wearing patches of black fur on my forearms might help attract them to a specific location; haven't found any product that does that, either.

One more random observation from the study: they're using a pretty neat little membrane feeder full of blood to test the mosquitoes. I'd heard of past studies where human lab assistants just stuck in an arm to be fed on. I guess it's lucky for the assistants that they've advanced past that, but I'd also read that they acclimate fairly quickly. I wonder: would anyone be up for intentionally exposing themselves like that? I've been getting bitten by the same species for a year and still have skin reactions; personally, I think if someone offered me a few days of suffering to gain a resistance, I'd go for it!

I don't think that "Algorithmic Everyone", the one you're phrasing as "real human interaction" is really either everyone or real humans. Instead, it's turning a handful of Kardashians into a million Kardashians. The number of performers, and niches, vastly grows but it's still all performance.

I think that's one reason that a lot of kids love TikTok but adults generally can't stand it. Kids are looking for sources that show them how to act. TikTok is basically a giant tips channel. Here's how to be silly, here's how to dance, here's how to be a goth... It's like an enormous highschool, but if the highschool were completely made up of amateur actors trying to get the most attention.

Based on the other comments I thought this article would be suggesting that there's a new trend taking place with people in their 30s. The author does seem to be trying to position it as "hey look at this interesting phenomenon" but doesn't actually claim that it's new in any way.

So basically: we're becoming our parents, or repeating a story that every generation goes through. Personally, my parents had piles of records from the 60s-80s but didn't listen to that much music. I do listen to a few hours of music each day, including whatever new stuff I can find, but it's mainly work noise to cover up other sounds.

Some of the declining interest can be likened to comedy. When you're 15 or 25, there are a lot of jokes you haven't heard before. If you're 35... or 65... certain routines start sounding pretty worn out. With music I suspect there's also a social learning component: we fall in love with music when we're young and still trying to find our place in the world. Music tickles the same communication centers in the brain that are used for social positioning, and the value of that, also, fades later on.

Administration costs have gone something like 4x since 1980. The specific share they take is probably dependent on the niche, but like universities, a huge portion of cost is siphoned away to paper pushing.

One of the items this article doesn't cover is healthcare spending, which has increased between 2 and 8 times since 1980 (depending on whether you're looking at individual spending or share of GDP). Here's a decent collection of charts: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

It has been shocking to me to see how cheap and effective healthcare can be in other countries, from an emergency visit to the hospital (in the US: I got a $50k bill for one emergency surgery) to an eye test and new pair of glasses (US costs running $500-$1000, although startups have chipped away at this). In the US, healthcare is effectively a collection of cartels -- an enormous parasite that will be nearly impossible to rip off our soft underbelly.

I did read it. Sounds like there may be some issues that need to be worked on. Possibly some lawsuits filed. But my question was simple: why should other countries not having euthanasia make it harder to get MAD in Canada?

A huge number of countries will never have euthanasia for religious reasons. Nothing else. There is no reasoning behind it, except taboo and scripture.

As for people being individually opposed to euthanasia, meh. The same people are, generally, quite comfortable with leaving people to die in overwhelming pain and misery. As Mother Theresa famously said: "Pain, sorrow and suffering are the kiss of Jesus." The push for allowing euthanasia comes from people who find just as much disgust and distress in the veneration of suffering as people on the other side do in the idea that anyone would ever die prematurely. But I doubt many of the euthanasia supporters would oppose continuing to work on and improve the systems.