wdr1

Respectfully, did you ever play tackle football? I ask because it's easy to look at something you're not familiar with & not see the value.

I played football in high school & college. Did I get hurt? Yes. But I also got hurt in other sports. My worst injury by far was in baseball (it required ~22 stitches & I couldn't see out of one eye for a while).

With every activity there's a tradeoff with risk.

Let's say we take tackle football off the table. We ban it from high schools, justifying it based on a study showing it produced 3.96 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions & 8.22 concussions per 10,000 (the highest for both).[1]

Okay, but then do we also ban woman's soccer?

It's the second highest, at 2.65 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions and 6.11 concussions per 10,000.

Or why let our children take any risk?

As a parent, I know I can't shelter my children. They have to take some risk. I let my children ride a bike, knowing full well there is a non-zero chance he could get by a car. We live in a big city & I let my pre-teen walk to meet a friend at a local burger joint for lunch, knowing full well there are bad people in the world who might do something untoward to him.

As for CTE specifically, I am very concerned about in the NFL. I have mixed feelings if I'm complicit in things by watching. As a diehard Bears fan, I found Dave Duerson's story heartbreaking. I'm supportive of the guardian helmets and hope the league starts to mandate them.

But the athletes in the NFL are not like amateurs. They are far bigger, far stronger, far faster. You can't take the CTE data from professional & extrapolate it to high school, etc.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11113040

Well done! I went back & read the first two as well. I really enjoyed all three.

> As someone who lived the first Internet block due to protests

I believe the first Internet block due to protests was in the Maldives in 2004.

The US blocked China from ramping down its use of oil?

Why is it the US President?

US emissions are down 9-10% and China emissions are up by 23-25%.[1]

China represents ~32% of global emissions.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

What countries have you tried to move to that rejected you & why?

> I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue.

Are they devaluing their brand?

Their sales are up.

Brand Finance Global 500 holds that at #1.

Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies places them at #1.

I cannot think of a single metric supporting their brand has been devalued.

Well, aside from a single poster on HN who doesn't seem to realize they're out of sync with the rest of society.

All of this "you need to understand the code" discussion reminds me of when I was an undergrad. I worked in a computer with someone a fair bit older -- they had even worked with punchcard systems. He was always happy to oblige us with war stories from the olden times & we would lap them up.

He favorite axe to grind was how my generation put too much trust into the compiler. "Just because it compiles doesn't mean you're done. You need to look at the actual assembly. Compilers can be VERY inefficient."

This was in the 90s. There was some merit to his claim.

But today? How many people who write Javascript look at the actual assembly code that is run? Not many.

I can't help but wonder if this current "you need to understand the code" is the same thing all over again. And if in a few years, almost nobody will look at the generated Python, Ruby, etc.

> The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.

From Amazon's perspective, that would be very much the wrong way.

Amazon's concerns here aren't technical. It's entirely about being disintermediated.

It's a common pattern in Apple products. They make it hard to turn off settings they really don't want you to turn off.

Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.

Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.

> I would date this beginning to 2013. That's around when Facebook feed ceased to be chronological. That's when everyone became rabid.

I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember things being pretty rabid in the 1980s.

I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.

And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.

We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.

For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.

Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.

> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.

I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.

Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.

In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.

This doesn't make me anti-government.

I see the need for it & I want it work well.

But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.

I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.

It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.

If Kevin Mitnick were still with us, I feel like he would be proud of these guys.

It's paywalled. Could you recap for us?

> It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket

That does sound taxing. Is it volunteer or do people get paid?

> Shouldn’t UAE be upset their entire economy has absolutely rammed by the war started by Israel?

It's pretty convoluted logic to blame Israel for Iran attacking the UAE.

> The fact that this question needs asking tells a lot about how other countries see the current administration.

Not really. You just weren't paying attention before. To wit, countries (including Germany!) have been questioning the safety of storing gold in the United State long before the Trump administration.

Examples 2012: Venezuela Receives Last Shipment of Repatriated Gold Bars https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-01-31/venezuela...

2013: Bundesbank to retrieve $200bn of gold reserves (Bundesbank is Germany’s independent central bank) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/15/bundesbank-ret...

2014: Netherlands moves 122.5 from New York https://www.dutchnews.nl/2016/02/85796-2/

There's obviously more, but that gives you a sense of it.

We live very close to Grant. We go through this intersection to walk our kids to their schools & know the crossing guards pretty well.

This matches exactly what they said.

That kid is lucky it was a Waymo & not a human driven car.

> 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market

What about China? India?

I remember it too!

But not everyone was on dial-up. A lot were in dorms w/ (for the time) high speed connections or workplaces with it.

Remember at the time it wasn't clear that search was going to be the dominate pattern for how people found information on the web. It seems crazy now, but in the early days of the web, the space was small enough that a directory-style approach worked pretty well. It was Yahoo's directory that made it initially popular, not its search.

And so there was a fair bit of debate on which was better -- something like a directory + search (a la Yahoo!) vs just search.

It took a bit of time before search proved if it was done really well, you didn't need a directory.

> I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much

It depends on how you define "suck."

When Google first launched it's homepage, its emptiness (just a logo & search box) was a stark contrast to the portal pages popular, which were loaded with content.

Some thought the Google homepage "sucked" whereas other liked it. (I was in the latter.)

Likewise, the interface for Gmail. Or the interface for Google Maps. Or the interface for Chrome.

> I consider this abuse of the visitor.

Why can't anything simply be "disliked" anymore?

I get you don't like it.

But abused?

Because there's a slide-in?

On a site run by volunteers?

For open source software you get for free?

That you freely choose to visit?

Calling that abuse seems... off. I have no concerns with people saying the don't like something. But the current nature to be hyperbolic is off-putting to me.

Does this apply to political lists too? I know political calls/text are excluded from Do Not Call and hence I get a crap ton of political spam texts (most recently from "Adam Miller for Congress OH-15", despite never living in Ohio). I'd really, really like to remove myself from all these political lists.

> I think we should start separating discussion of “The Economy” from “human prosperity and wellbeing.”

* Extreme poverty is at its lowest level in human history, down by over a billion people since 1990.

* More humans can read, write, and attend school than ever before, especially girls in lower-income countries.

* Global life expectancy has more than doubled compared to 1900

* Most countries continue to rise on human-development measures (health, education, income)

Yes, there's more room to keep improving, but the world keeps getting better & better.

Merry Christmas!

Thanks. I was making a joke about Powell's original location. A lot of people think it was in Portland, but it's actually Chicago (Hyde Park area).

Despite spending most of youth playing the NES, I don't think I ever read a manual.

"Reliance on documentation is the hallmark of a novice & a coward."

No.

And having worked in digital advertising for 20+ years, I'd be shocked if they are anywhere as effective as often claimed.

It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.