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Err_Eek

> Educate the parents instead to spend more right time with their children.

This is kind of assuming that the parents have full control over the lives of their children. Which:

a. Isn't true b. Shouldn't be true (because some parents are bad)

As a parent you go to work for 8+ hours per day. During that time your child is in the care of "society" (school / daycare / whatever). And during that time the only thing that protects them is laws and regulations.

> This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those.

In most (or at least a lot of) countries states regulate casinos _so much_ than it becomes almost a technicality that casinos are privately owned.

Also with lotteries you have the scale factor -- in order to have an attractive lottery, you need a ton of ticket buyers, so if you have a national level lottery you can definitely make neighborhood lotteries way less appealing.

Blackjack and poker tables don't scale the same way.

Re:You've Been Thinking About Inflation All Wrong (2022) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @09:52AM (#39778501)
... I haven't been thinking about inflation

...

But less jokingly, "you're wrong about X"/"you're doing X wrong" is quite clickbaity

Re:Create More, Consume Less (2021) on Tuesday March 12, 2024 @12:04AM (#39676083)
imagine a writer writing more books than they read.

imagine a film director directing more movies than they watch.

imagine a software engineer writing more code than they read.

imagine a musician writing more songs than they listen to.

... etc etc

Re:Young people are flocking to astrology on Monday July 24, 2023 @02:00AM (#36843607)
(As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true)

It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.

Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.

Re:Probability and Markets by Jane Street [pdf] on Friday June 16, 2023 @10:34AM (#36357185)
Personally -- I couldn't get past the first 2 chapters of the book. The notations it introduces are pretty unfamiliar for a newcomer and it quickly becomes really hard to follow. I genuinely would like to hear from somebody who managed to go through the entire book above, and what their main takeaways were (from the chapters that follow the two introductory ones).

The non-technical introduction chapter is pretty easy to follow, and I would recommend reading it.

I was asking myself the same question. The conclusion I came to is that the getting your mind blown phase doesn't keep you coming back again and again -- it's why games like Minecraft/League of Legends have much higher player counts than say The Last of Us, or other certified mind-blowing games.

I have a Quest 2 and a Steam Deck. Definitely my Steam Deck is getting more use, though it's initial "wow" factor was smaller.

Re:Irish police to be given powers over passwords on Monday June 14, 2021 @11:27AM (#27503744)
Idk, there's ways of making you speak

https://xkcd.com/538/

Re:Just Be Rich on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @05:01AM (#26789809)
> I think less people are interested in actually owning their housing.

How do you reconcile this impression of yours with the fact that housing prices are shooting up in all major cities, and have been so for decades? Why is this happening if fewer people are actually interested in owning their own housing?

As a sidenote: in my own personal experience housing is the single major issue of all my close friends and family, but it's only an option for a small minority of them. In fact, I have never met a single person who was in the financial position to buy a house/apartment and didn't do so.

Re:George W. Bush is smarter than you (2013) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @05:02AM (#25774469)
What I meant is that making fun about how silly he was is elitist, meaning people like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert did nothing to help the liberal cause.

George Bush himself does indeed come from political royalty, which is why he did his best to present himself as the exact opposite, an average person.

Re:George W. Bush is smarter than you (2013) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @04:58AM (#25774424)
> He's just lucky that President Trump came along to steal the title of "greatest criminal in the White House in the last 50 years" from him.

Pretty hard to make the argument than in terms of kill count Bush doesn't win this one

Re:George W. Bush is smarter than you (2013) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @04:47AM (#25774299)
(a) & (b) definitely.

But I think that looking at it in context, it was a piece that maybe liberals should have read. During the Bush years everybody liked to point out the gaffes Bush was doing as if intelligent college educated people never messed up a word in a speech.

The fact is that Bush is indeed smarter than the bulk of people who really relished in laughing at his gaffes, and in hindsight all that sniggering did nothing to stop the surge of increasingly radical right wing ideas.

Even from my very left-wing perspective I found the constant mocking of Bush worrying and elitist -- the first thing that should come in people's minds when they think about Bush should not be silly & almost endearing gaffes, but Gitmo, Irak, Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand of corpses he left behind.

Re:Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service on Friday November 06, 2020 @05:19AM (#25006541)
> I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.

It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.

Re:Living with Your Desk Mates on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:25AM (#23778394)
I expect it to become significantly less fun the moment one of them gets fired / lags behind the others on work performance / gets into a long term relationship and wants to move out and suddenly finds out they're not one of the guys anymore
> One observation I'll make is that although adoption is considered a noble act in the US, many other countries consider it be throwing your baby away to be exploited.

Adoption is considered a noble act in Romania

Re:No Recent Automation Revolution on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @09:37AM (#23476854)
At the time there were two issues: - (I think) school teachers were better paid than now, relative to the average population - People in communism mostly knew the US through Hollywood films, which portray a way more glitzy version reality. Especially so in the 80s in popular sitcoms like Dallas.
Re:No Recent Automation Revolution on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @01:26AM (#23474241)
My dad was salty during communism that he didn't get more "respect" for his labor (highschool teacher) than your run of the mill factory worker. I remember during the early 90s how he was hopefully saying that once the country exits the "transition" phase, we will all have the dignified life of middle class westerners.

Meanwhile the country still does the same in international rankings as it did during the time of our dear leader. However more of the egalitarianism we had disappeared, and while some enjoy some semblance of prosperity in the heart of the major cities, the bulk of the nation has no job security and no future prospect but to be a cheap labor source for the west.

Re:Urbit OS 1 on Friday May 01, 2020 @03:19AM (#23039784)
I don't know man, I tried to use it two weeks ago and I couldn't even get the chat to work. Neither could I try out their functional programming language.
Re:68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:43AM (#23016881)
Actually I'm European. Though on European powers winning land wars in Asia -- I think it's a question of what are the boundaries of Europe, both in time and in space. And Kevin Kelly was wise not to get into that debate.
Re:68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:09AM (#23016677)
I will make sure never to get myself in a land war in Asia
Re:68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @01:25AM (#23015669)
This reminds me a lot of that "wear sunscreen" chain mail

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen

These folksy wisdom thingies, especially from accomplished people, come off as patronizing to me.

Re:SICP in Python on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @01:42PM (#23009614)
I have been using #lang sicp in Racket to go through (most of) SICP -- and it's been mostly a smooth ride. DrRacket can get very slow on Linux, so eventually I switched back to vim+terminal once exercises started to require larger amounts of code.
Re:Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming? on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @02:30AM (#22863252)
I've been going through SICP for a year and a half now on and off. At this point I don't feel I've been getting back all the effort I put in it.

I think it's mostly recommended by people who didn't do all the exercises, or casually browsed through it and all they were left with was the fact that you can write a programming book without mentioning assignments until halfway through or that it's more easy to write a scheme interpreter in scheme than other languages.

But the book is really dense, and you won't be left with much after trying to debug your hundreds line script meant to solve one problem.

Any examples?
I think the point was that these studies aim to make a serious statement about serious topics, but they rarely get to be properly reproduced and tested. And when they're not challenged they can creep into our official medical guidelines, where they become doctrine, and it can take decades to convince people that not all fat is bad for you or that children with mild allergies should be exposed to allergens, and that a coffee per day will not cause high blood pressure.
A bottle of wine has 8 standard units of alcohol, and the British NHS recommends keeping the intake to < 14 units per week, so a bottle of wine per week should be well within the perfectly fine area.
I'll patiently wait until I see more physician consensus around this issue

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/08/24/john-ioannidis-aims-his...

Given the recent 180 degree turn on "eat fat => heart attack", I think some seriously well designed studies are needed for all studies that make a strong statement about what dietary choices one should make, especially for dietary choices made by humans since forever.

Re:The Death of External Storage: Where's Google? on Friday March 29, 2019 @10:47AM (#19522129)
I think Ubuntu Touch was supposed to be that, but it ended up being a market failure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch

Re:I Don't Like Debuggers (2000) on Friday March 22, 2019 @04:52AM (#19460610)
Even then it was most likely still one of the most ample software projects on the planet
Re:College Cheating Scandal: An Admissions Officer Speaks Out on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @02:23AM (#19376213)
It is normal behavior, everyone does it. But as that passed down wealth becomes more and more essential for a good life, society at large should stop pushing the myth that it is largely meritocratic, especially as lines between social classes become more rigid by the day.

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