throwawaythekey

I guess it depends on what you mean by normal. The point I am trying to make is it is common for Presidents to do things which are later deemed illegal.

> During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden experienced a sustained series of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court... "I think it is the toughest series of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s had many New Deal programs declared unconstitutional," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-dealt-bide...

I'm not particularly trying to argue if it's good or bad, just that presidents often stretch the law to apply their agenda. I would tend to side more on the bad side, but it seems necessary due to senate dysfunction.

What makes it a coup? Trump was elected on a platform of government reform and that's what he is doing.

As an Australian who had friends who bought product on silk road my understanding was:

1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.

2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).

Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.

I haven't worked in FAANG but I recently applied to Amazon in Australia. I interviewed with 3 asians, 2 indians and 1 white guy. YMMV.

> But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.

This happens with some races more than others. When you import Indians you are importing caste thinking.

I hate to nitpick but as you called the previous comment nonsense

> Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.

Vaccines are commonly designed to prevent transmission. For example it is a critical aspect of the measles vaccine [1]. If a magic wand could've been waved the covid vaccines would've worked that way too, and that is why they were sold to the public as reducing transmission.

> Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW...

There are enough counterexamples of people and places where different trade-offs were chosen. e.g. Brisbane. To say they were vital is injecting your own opinion.

c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated... instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home... it has taken years for the system to recover.

The overwhelming majority of people were always just going to need to stay at home for a few days, even pre vaccine. The reason the system has taken so long to recover is due to the suboptimal approach we took where we elongated the period of reduced throughput through the hospital system. The effect here was threefold:

1) The backlog of surgeries needed to be cleared.

2) Many patients had worsened over covid and now required more intense treatment.

3) Preventable disease was not being caught in routine checkups etc.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

A few other things I would add:

- MySQL performs a bit better when reading by primary key

- Postgres performs a bit better when doing random inserts/updates.

- MySQL you don't need to worry about vacuums

- The MySQL query optimizer is nice because you can give it hints when it misbehaves. This can be a godsend during certain production incidents.

- Last I checked MySQL still has a nicer scaling story than postgres, but I'm not sure what the latest here is.

- Connection pooling is still heavily in MySQLs favor i.e. you don't need the PG bouncer for lots for scenarios.

> Intel's real problem is that their products have struggled to be competitive in the marketplace on a price and performance level.

That's not super true. AMD has had good outlier performance in gaming with the X3Ds for a while, but for regular use something like a 13400f has been as good of a deal as any AMD chip.

Arrow lake seems to have definitely made the situation worse for intel though.

> There are many TV channel alternatives

There are many social medias

> public TV is pretty transparent

In what manner? As a kid I didn't know that the pokemon cartoon existed in order to make me buy trading cards.

Even in news there is an army of editors and producers making decisions all of the time. This leads to things like the state media adding sound effects to footage to make it more sensational and then after losing in court investigating themselves and finding no intentional wrongdoing [1]!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/05/abc-editorial-...

Call me oldschool but to me a functioning democracy is where anyone can express their opinions. Neo nazis, zionists, anti zionists, jews, palestinians, socialists, globalists, communists, libertarians etc.

If TV were to be banned under similar reasoning would you believe that to be justified? TV programming is similarly opaque to the social media algorithms.

Is there a time when you would find "nanny state" to be a useful concept? What would make that situation different to the social media ban?

I find it uncomfortable that so many of the arguments focus on practicality and that so few focus on liberty. It almost seems like a forgotten concept.

In day to day life we are fairly free but for example we have much weaker freedom of speech/opinion than the USA. For example if you raise your arm at a particular angle you can now be sent to jail [1].

We also had some of the longest/harshet COVID lockdowns in the world in my state.

[1] - https://www.dw.com/en/australia-man-convicted-for-performing...

Are these same parents unable to tell their children "no you can't stay out late it's a school night"

Due to the shared nature of the internet it's very hard to implement a technically foolproof block.

For example you could rent a server on AWS, forward your traffic to it (e2e encrypted) and then have that forward your traffic to a regular VPN.

Now just imagine that the VPN does the forwarding for you and offers it as a service.

I started using the internet unsupervised heavily in my tweens in the early 2000's and came across some horrendous stuff pretty early. Despite that, for me I think it's been a net positive and I would like my children to grow up in a similar environment.

The lasting qualities I think it's given me are:

- An open mindedness and the ability to examine issues from multiple angles

- A thick skin against shocking material/online forms of bullying

- A stronger understanding of how technology interacts with society/power structures

I think the country needs to be building digitally strong youth, not trying to put the genie back into the bottle.

I thought native edge was pretty good, it was disappointing when they gave it up.

Call me old fashioned but I think browsers will advance faster when we don't have a chromium monopoly outside of the apple ecosystem.

My ideal outcome would be something like:

1) Chrome is spun out as a standalone entity. Google would originally have full ownership but be forced to sell down over time.

2) Google buys the Chrome traffic at a fair price

3) Apple sells their traffic to someone else, potentially an AI search player (Meta??)

4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source

Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.

They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.

Companies regularly buy and sell parts of themselves. I think the standard approach would be for Chrome employees to be given golden handcuffs of some sort.

In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.

There are different forms of overpayment but to give some examples:

- The recent story of AWS using serverless for video processing comes to mind [1].

- Google is renowned for rest and vest.

- Many government jobs pay more than their private counterparts.

- Military contractors

- Most of the healthcare industry

- Lobbyists

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811741

> If your "dumbest engineer" got a job and a hefty raise going to Netflix, it means he was very capable engineer who was playing the part of moron

It's also possible that there's very little correlation between capability, reputation and salary.

Don't we all know someone who is overpaid? There are more than a few well known cases of particular employers who select for overpaid employees...

Also note that the government is attacking social media on a second front.

Last night they took advantage of the population being distracted by the US election by having an extended parliamentary session to push forward with a second reading of the controversial misinformation bill.

The government and state media apparatus are of course both immune from any penalty under the bill.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/acma-crackdown-social...

I'm not an expert but gut checking against this chart https://c19early.org/plot/bpall.png

  1. The exercise, diet, sunlight, zinc, and vitamin d results all seem plausible. They are well known to improve your immune system.

  2. Remdesivir was originally recommended for covid19 but then they stopped using it. I'm surprised the plasma has such a poor result because that was heavily hailed originally too.

  3. Paxlovid and HCQ are both widely recommended, in line with the results presented.

So as far as I can tell (which isn't far!) it seems like a reasonable analysis.

The main point I wanted to make is Borody is far from alone in being interested in c19 and ivermectin.

I'm mostly just trying to provide Thomas Borody the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he would do a much better job of defending himself.

Funny podcast in general and great if you are looking for one that is highly critical of whatever book they are reviewing.

Cure is a strong word but there's plenty of research which supports ivermectin being effective against COVID.

https://c19ivm.org/

The medical commmunity will almost always be skeptical of new theories, sometimes this is well placed but sometimes it isn't.

That's neither here nor there though, the main takeaway is you probably shouldn't go to economists for medical advice.