Mbioguy

History may not repeat but it does rhyme. Harappan civ thought to have declined due to less water. Petra once thrived due to a system of dams, cisterns, and water conduits, but never-repaired damage after an earthquake and increasing aridity meant it less and less supported urbanism and so declined. The Soviets overexploited the Aral Sea which has yet to (and will likely never) recover. It is now spoiling the surrounding region with dust storms carrying with them pollutants from industry that settled in the drying lakebed. Owens Lake in California once fed LA, but when it dried up it too caused polluting dust storms. Gov't has not learned from this history. The western US's water rights are outdated to the point of creating utterly backwards incentives. For example, Utah has use-it-or-lose-it water rights and the lion's share of water in the Great Salt Lake's watershed gets used to grow alfalfa. Alfalfa itself isn't necessarily a bad choice if you're going to grow stuff in an arid region, the issue is more how much of it is grown and in a wasteful way (little to no drip irrigation and no incentive to start using it, instead farmers are incentivized to flood areas during times of heavy rainfall or risk losing water rights). However even city and residential water use (a much smaller %) is still per capita wasteful compared to nearby Vegas which has done a much better job of becoming efficient in its water use. Utah got lucky this year in its snowpack, potentially buying some time to change, but is that gonna happen? No, they're praying for moisture and thinking their prayers got answered. Any guesses how long it'll be before the Great Salt Lake becomes the US/capitalism's Aral Sea? 5 years, 10, 15? Any techies wanting to move out here might think twice, homes without water and with seasonal arsenic-laden dust clouds probably won't have much resale value.

Note: if you want a meaningful discussion about physician salaries, you need to be discussing lifetime income after tax and after debt repayment, and compare this metric to other professions. Comparing the yearly salary of a vascular surgeon with 10-15 years of post-high school education, training, and compounding debt interest to the yearly salary of a junior developer ignores the very different lifetime shape of the careers.

Any substantial change to the pay structure for physicians needs to address the cost of education and training, and not screw over a large cohort of physicians saddled with debt who see a massive pay cut. They will significantly oppose any attempted changes that don't address these two things.

Doctors in Europe are paid a good bit less than here in the US, but their education is paid for (and then some) by the state.

Wow, lots to unpack here. First off, MAs are not remotely comparable to PAs or physicians. MAs typically earn a certificate, and salary is 20-30k. They are typically office or clerical workers with a medical support role. They are not diagnosticians or prescribers, like physicians, PAs, or NPs are. So talk of MAs 'practicing medicine' is weird, they don't, that's not the job role. We need them, they aren't well paid... nice work punching down there mate.

Frankly, this comment just sounds like you have an axe to grind with PAs. (Hence conflating MAs with PAs.)

PA is a Master's degree. They diagnose, treat, and prescribe. Unlike MDs, who are board-certified independent practitioners, PAs are not trained to work independently but as part of a team. In some cases that means they function as physician extenders, freeing up physicians to focus on more complicated cases. In other areas they focus on tasks delegated to them, for example central lines or other procedures, wound care. Some are used as First Assists in surgery, others are used for pre and postsurgical care, which helps surgeons do more surgeries. In any case, while the roles for physicians and PAs are much more similar, the condescension remains in your comment.

Punching down on MAs is inconceivably poor form. Punching down on PAs is still bad. Conflating the two gives away your game. You suggest harm... have any evidence to back this up?

Hint: you won't find any. There aren't a ton of studies, and quality could be better, but mid-levels (NPs and PAs) who stay within their roles have comparable outcomes to physician colleagues. How can this be, given the difference in training time? Easy. The roles are different. The subset of pts managed by PAs/NPs is different than MDs, because professionals consult and transfer care when appropriate. It's no different than a family practitioner or hospitalist consulting specialists. Nobody does everything, healthcare is a team effort.

Trash talking other professions, especially without evidence, is unprofessional.

Azores, Canary Islands, Madeira

You've got it backwards. This has nothing to do with mandatory reporting laws. You are assuming something is said about person B during person A's confessional. That isn't what is being described.

A student confesses to their religious leaders that they have done some sin. Fine, go through the religious repentance process. That's how things normally work in other religions too. A religious leader doesn't have authority to academically punish someone. What doesn't normally happen, is that this info gets shared with a school authority that does. And then the school authority shares info with campus police, from where it can also go into state or federal databases.

Or it goes the other way, where info given to city police ends up in the hands of academic or religious folks who use it abusively.

A student like Madi Barney is assaulted, she goes to city police. City police share detailed info with campus police, who share it with title ix and honor code office, who share it with religious authorities. She was not the assaulter, she was the victim. Yet, because a part of the police report includes a history of some breaking of the honor code, even though as in my original response predators manipulate folks into doing this, she ends up being investigated and punished academically and religiously. City PD ends up functionally an investigation and enforcement arm of academic and religious authorities. That is ABSOLUTELY institutional abuse of power.

I didn't share much of my personal experiences, just enough to rebut the claim that religious attendance is not mandatory, that was the purpose of paragraphs 1-2 so I don't know what you are going on about. The rest of the response was what detailed the abusive system.

I didn't even touch on how this is used against LGBT students.

You're being disingenuous and attempting to deflect from real issues. It's not only the text of the honor code that matters, but also the social context and how it is applied.

If you attend BYU as an LDS member, you need to maintain an ecclesiastical endorsement. Part of this includes paying tithing and attending at least some services. If you do not maintain your ecclesiastical endorsement, you can have a hold put on your account to where you can't register for additional classes, graduate, and possibly can't even apply for a transcript. In short, they can keep you from transferring schools unless you are willing to start from scratch, in order to get you to comply. Yes, that is mandatory religious worship, just with extra steps between point a and c. I should know. I attended BYU within the last decade and stopped believing at that time. You are not free to cease being a practicing LDS member. As it is a private school, I would have been fine had they simply asked me to pay the non-member tuition, or requested that I transfer schools. Instead they held my transcript as punishment. I had to grovel and go through a family friend to get an ecclesiastical endorsement to get a transcript. What rubbish. Surely you would be upset if Notre Dame treated a student who converted from Catholicism to Mormonism similarly?

The Honor Code Office has a whole history rife with abuse. In 2015, student Madi Barney was raped. She reported this to Provo police. She was placed under investigation by the Honor Code Office and was barred for a time from enrolling in classes. Unlike previous victims of this institutional abuse, she fought back and went public, ultimately forcing the Title IX office to formally separate from the Honor Code office. Previously information had been shared freely between the two.

https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4732048&itype=CMSI...

And it's not just the Honor Code Office and the Title IX office. BYU's campus police department was and is complicit in the institutional abuse of authority wielded to keep students in line. Earlier this year the BYU police department was sanctioned in a move to decertify the entire police department. This happened because they failed to investigate misconduct where campus officers were accessing and sharing information using external police databases.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/02/26/utah-moves-d...

In my own personal experience, I and friends disclosed information to religious leaders, which was subsequently disclosed to the honor code office and used to justify academic probation and punishment. Yes, this was absolutely a blatant violation of priest-penitent confidentiality.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the sharing of information between religious authorities, school's honor code office, title IX office, campus police, and external law enforcement. All in a direct line. Institutional abuse of power and crossing lines that should not be crossed.

The social implications of student body awareness that the Honor Code can be used against you as a student, has been taken advantage of by predators. During my time on campus, talking with victims of sexual assault, the following was explained to me. Would-be predators would attempt to target individuals, like women or closeted gay men, and manipulate them into breaking the honor code in some manner. And have a recording of this. And then assault them or attempt to coerce them. If the victim then went to the police, the campus would become aware that they had previously broken the Honor Code and would have action taken against them. This was used to try to silence victims and prevent them from turning to the authorities for help. And you know what? It worked in a number of cases I personally knew of, allowing predators to victimize multiple individuals before being stopped.

I'm no longer a believer, but reading this comment, I assume you are. Is this how you believe Jesus would want his church, and a school supposedly run in his name, behaving?

This article falls prey to a myopic view of capitalist vs communist 'econ'. The reality is that the 19th and early 20th centuries were abuzz with economic tinkering and innovation. Rather than a simple left/right dichotomy, there is a whole color palette of possibilities, if only only we can remember them, and then imagine them in a modern context.

Proudhon early on imagined a world without capitalist ownership, but with a free market. He expounded the idea of Mutualism, building from earlier writers like John Gray. This libertarian-socialist vision has little in common with either the state socialism of the USSR, or the internationally-corporate world we live in today. Socialism as social ownership of the means of production, either by workers (agricultural or factory coops), communities (in our time, municipal fiber), or users/consumers (credit unions are a descendant of mutualist credit systems).

Later socialists argued over the recompense owed to individual labor vs the community as a whole (Bakunin v Marx), over the methods to reach their aims (through socialist parties, or revolution and establishment of a proletarian state, or through direct expropriation as the syndicalists and anarchocommunists did in Spain).

Later writers and revolutionists fought against imperialism, against racism and apartheid, for feminism and LGBT rights, and now for the rights of animals and the environment.

We have always allowed some few to take the lion's share of our collective efforts. To run our mutual efforts like their private fiefdoms. We tolerate in privately-held companies what we never would in public democracy.

And now, now that the world has been globalized and new markets exhausted, they look to privatize our public lands, our schools, prisons, thoroughfares, and every other system held in common.

Programmers are waking up to their exploitation. There is more talk of forming coops and unionizing than I have ever heard. However, I hope you all (and we) keep in mind that our affluence, now or future, also rests on the inherited exploitation of others in our past and around the world. Let's not be like the white American socialists who were exclusionary towards others' struggles (and whose efforts were broken when the capitalists brought in those they excluded as scabs). Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past. But to do that, we need to know them.

Boy are you in for a surprise. Medical school lectures are mostly optional these days and are entirely skipped by a significant proportion of med students in favor of resources like Strong Medicine (literally a YouTube channel), gigantic Anki digital flashcard decks (see reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki), UWorld, First Aid, Sketchy, Pathoma, etc. 'High Yield' is the buzzword for resources that are a better use of time. So yes, you almost certainly will trust a doctor someday who was educated at least in part by YouTube or comparable online resources. You just won't know it, since the paper on the wall will say "University of X". And as long as they pass the boards and make it through residency, does it matter?

Nothing in evolution is inevitable. Granted some things are more likely (oxygen-binding hemoglobin has independently evolved several times from its related non-binding globin family). Brains, nervous systems, even multicellularity are not inevitable. The specific combination of astronomical, geological, and biological features that lead to our development might not lead to similar outcomes if ran a million times.

As other responders have pointed out, brains are just one possible substrate for intelligence. We can't account for other systems (biological or otherwise) that could lead to the development of intelligence, so of necessity any probability estimate based on us has to be a lower bound of possibility.

One bit of our earth history that is worth noting is that the conditions when life presumably arose are hostile to multicellular life as we know it. Earth's early oceans were hot, anoxic and reducing, and under heavy pressure from far thicker atmospheres. The great oxidation event essentially turned earth's atmosphere into a bacterial waste dump, the waste being oxygen produced by early cyanobacteria. Life had to evolve ways to cope with oxygen or learn to hide. This is still true of our own cells. While we need oxygen to survive, it is still and will always be toxic. Free radical damage such as from reactive oxygen species is a constant threat, and is the ultimate form of irrecoverable information death when we die.

Might it be that the conditions under which life can arise, and under which intelligent life can arise, are different? We got lucky that earth traversed from the first to the second. Add this to the list of a million things that had to go right for us to exist at all. The same might well be true of any other intelligences out there. And the odds of two arising close enough in time and space to contact each other would be far less common than lonely civilizations looking out into the dark.

This. I'm gonna cut to the chase: that line is probably the most fascist thing I'm going to read all day, and excepting you, Hacker News has failed to call it out. This idea that war can somehow mythically rejuvenate the ethos or spirit of a country isn't unique to fascism though. It was also common in the jingoist imperial western european powers, and partly used as justification for aggression against neighbors and abroad.

This is disgusting to see at the top of the comment thread. Anyone who upvoted that comment needs to engage in some serious introspection.

This tactic, of identifying a problem that may have some real validity, but then making logical leaps into absurdity, is typical of postmodern types like Bannon. How exactly does war solve the problem identified? Who are we to watch against?

It's not always about the words that are said. There's a subtext or more than one. The given justification isn't always the real justification, it just has to be plausible enough to get the real message out, seen in that last line. The overton window opens, and those on the sidelines who might have kept similar thoughts to themselves can now be drawn in and engaged. And that last sentence creeps closer to becoming real.

Oppose these ideas and these tactics, HN.

Utilities are natural monopolies. Not exactly the best fit for a market solution, especially when, as in this case, they are negative externalities borne by the public that the company is trying to avoid paying for.

Yes, it's impossible to convince a large number of people to switch, which perfectly explains why Maine is still using FPtP despite the large push for RCV a few years ago.

/s

Proof by contradiction, mate. It's not impossible, just hard. There's plenty of things that once we're said to be impossible, and the data agreed... until they happened. Everything had to have had a first time.

I like Approval voting for single positions that are supposed to represent a community rather than a faction: mayor, governor, county commissioner, etc. Mixed member for legislative bodies and Ranked Choice for anything else.

"They thoughtlessly order tests and thoughtlessly obey the results."

Hacker News, come on. You're better than this.

Taking it from the top: The obvious take is that the new tools this is referring to is EMR and things like Watson. Will return to this in a moment.

Subjective and objective data both a play a role in medicine. The eye of an experienced person can often see in a blink what would be missed by someone looking only at numbers in a chart. Gestalt, or the fast system of Kahneman, is invaluable when time is a serious concern. But noone starts out that way. The slower, methodical plod of consciously using bayesian thinking is how the art is learned. Hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras... trying to weigh all available data and attempting to chart a course that gives patients the best outcomes at the most reasonable costs. Nowadays additional hoops must be jumped through: laws constrain, institutions have policies that must be followed, and most of all care is dictated by what is allowed by the insurance company. Rather than an invisible hand, this is an invisible supervisor robbing much autonomy and initiative from a sense of worthwhile work. Furthermore the ever-present fear of litigation pushes towards a course with more testing than might be suggested by treatment and diagnosis alone: how would this course be defended if things go wrong, as they will for a certain number? All of these things individually stood to reason, but we as a society must keep in mind the cumulative weight of it all. Emergent phenomena isn't just a thing of programs and physics, it's a thing of human systems like healthcare.

Back to the article. A happy picture is painted of modern CT scans, yet it neglects the downsides. In 1980 the average per capita dose of radiation was 3.0 mSv, with 0.5 coming from medical imaging. It is now 5.5 mSv and rising, with medical imaging alone exceeding 3.0 mSv. Medical imaging is now a larger source of ionizing radiation than all other sources combined, with particularly high risks for those in utero or pediatrics. Like any other test or treatment, there is a risk/reward ratio. As technology improves, it is more likely to be adopted, not because earlier physicians were anti-technology Luddites, but because the improved technology changed that risk/reward ratio. We are more likely to use imaging with less exposure, or better yet use a modality without that risk.

Back to the Bayesian part of thinking... testing isn't perfect. I'd love to see a test that is 100% sensitive and 100% specific. But there are inevitably false positives and false negatives. Tools and tests need to be used in an appropriate situation. For example: I have a test that is 99% sensitive. Great! It'll catch someone with the disease, 99% of the time. So I can thoughtlessly order tests and thoughtlessly obey the results, right? Wrong. What happens if you use it to test for a rare disease that only 0.1% of the population will have? It depends on how specific the test is. How many false positives does it let in? If I test it on 1,000 folks indiscriminately, I'll end up with a basket of folks, only one of which actually has the disease. How many false positives got treated (and possibly harmed by that treatment)? Mammograms work this way (which have fallen a little out of favor in younger demographics without risk factors like the BRCAs), necessitating imaging and invasive biopsies that, upon further collection of data and review, seem not worthwhile for those under 40 and of questionable value under 50.

Tools are great! They need to be used appropriately though. Things have a cost, not just financial but physical and temporal. Indiscriminate use of tests and tools is the last thing anyone should want.

Nothing to add in a world of advancing technology? Bah. Most would love for its promises to come to fruition. EMR for example. We were promised time savings, with cross-talk between systems for better availability of data and improved patient safety. Mostly what has happened is administrators now have data used to push docs to see more and more patients (and spend less and less time with any one of them), all the while the paperwork stacks up. Somehow the paperwork never quite seemed to go away.

Maybe doctors don't reject tools that make their jobs easier. The article is full of tools that were eventually adopted, after all. I can point to many in development that have their ardent advocates, like point-of-care ultrasound among many others. Maybe they don't like tools that were sold as making their jobs easier but mostly don't, and instead benefit insurance companies and conglomerate administrators.

Counterpoint I posted in r/askscience last year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7kq5r4/what_det...

For those of us who want to switch to alternate electoral methods like RCV, approval voting, multimember districting, etc, using machine counting is a big deal. If you are paper only, the increased labor to do repeated tabulations (as is done to an extent in RCV) is significant. It is the reason a bill to implement RCV in a state I used to live failed, after passing the state house and being discussed for some time in the state senate.

Whatever counting method you are using and whatever reporting method you are using, it needs to be verifiable. I still can't believe we had ballots from 2016 that were destroyed after brin subpoenaed, without any consequence for those who had charge of their possession and safety.

Infectious etiology is not the same as being contagious. We know HPV causes increased cancer risk, but we don't treat folks with those cancers as contagious. They're not. But their malignancies do have an infectious cause - infection earlier in life. That's the relationship being proposed here with Alzheimer's. Understanding the nature of a disease is a prerequisite for developing better treatments. We should not the imaginary social fears of the uninformed get in the way of that exploration.

Paper ballots are not the obstacle. (I like paper ballots with optical scanning, as in my main post.) The obstacle is that there are some who want there to be no machine involvement in tabulation of results.

Media is hyping the fear of 'election hacking' to the point where people I know personally want everything to be done manually, no machine or computer involvement at all.

I was part of a now-tabled push for RCV in a red state a few years back. While it offered a solution to several issues and had some multiparty support, the big problem arose when the state legislators realized that the current machines used to aid in tabulating and reporting results couldn't do RCV tabulation. This meant either new machines would need to be bought or it would all have to be done by hand. The clerks ran the numbers and the number of volunteers required or increased cost was not viable. The decision was made to table considering RCV use statewide until the machines were scheduled to be replaced in half a decade.

The problem is that an individual ballot in RCV if counted manually, needs to be counted several times if the vote ends up switching to the 2nd, 3rd, or fourth choice etc. As the number of total votes increases from the thousands to hundreds of thousands (or even millions), this can cause a pseudo-exponential growth in the amount of counting labor performed. Large municipalities that have trialed RCV have forged ahead with manual counts and succeeded despite the increased effort, but it has sometimes taken days to report results. That's only after massive amounts of labor from volunteers.

Going statewide with manual-only counts of paper ballots (no optical scanning or other machine-assisted counting) makes RCV or other methods of determining winner much more difficult because of the labor or cost involved.

It should be clear that I quite like RCV, but this is a factor to consider.

Doesn't going paper-only make it difficult to switch to alternative voting systems like RCV (as Maine is) or multiple-member districting at anything beyond a local level? FPTP is fairly simple to count by hand and other methods can be more labor-intensive as the total number of votes increases.

I am all for having a paper trail, mandatory audits, and secure infrastructure. I agree with those who thing the current private sector systems for voting have huge issues. What I don't understand is what I see as media pushing a false choice between paper or digital.

Estonia has been using e-voting alongside paper ballots for years without serious issues. (Of course, they have national ID and have digitized a lot of their gov't functions, so maybe this is a special case.)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di...

There are a lot of ways to improve our elections, from social engineering (France's media blackout a few days before elections, moving voting day to the weekend, making it multiple days, or just using the mail system) to improved systems like Scantegrity or increased use of optical scanning.

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

The cynic in me fears this is a push designed to make it harder for us to use things like RCV and entrench FPTP.

A deeply red/Republican and relatively low-density state might seem like a strange place to find a functional public transit system. Utah is an interesting place. The geography of the Wasatch Front lends itself to public transit in ways that less geographically-constrained places do not. The region is mostly a north-south corridor, with occasional off-shoots to the side, which is how the transit network has developed. There is a significant tech culture, from 'little silicon slopes' in Lehi to the significant student population. The valley has seasonal pollution problems caused by mountains to the east and west. This is made worse by the lake effect, which means energy solutions helpful elsewhere are less effective, like natural gas plants. What would otherwise be transient pollutants instead react with ammonia from the lake and persist in the atmosphere, further trapped by the mountains. Utah has a significant need for public transit, and getting students connected and using it is a great way for generational change to occur. Car culture still rules, and will for a long time, but this is a good thing to hear. Hopefully a Trax expansion or equivalent in Utah county will happen eventually. Until then, this seems the next best policy.

Few people have tried Anki (a free alternative to SuperMemo). Even fewer have tried its add-ons, which is where it truly shines! Vanilla Anki is mostly good for text flashcarding, with the phone app helpful for making use of those little bits of downtime throughout the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4xOe79epU&list=PL3MozITKTz...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzBoDe3PgAc&list=PL3MozITKTz...

Glutanimate has taken Anki to a whole new level. He created a painless UI for occluding any part of an image and making Anki flashcards out of it (Image Occlusion Enhanced). I used it to efficiently create and memorize thousands of anatomy flashcards. Ordered lists can be a real pain to memorize, but when not missing steps is crucial (as it is for medical OSCEs), Cloze Overlapper has worked very well.

Anki lets you share your decks with others, and medical students have collaboratively created very high quality study decks for studying for the various STEP exams.

To be honest, I was always a fairly mediocre student. Big-picture concepts and figuring things out on the fly, no prob. But I've always struggled to nail down bits of information long-term or learn sequential information, meaning calc and ochem required inordinate amounts of time. No longer the case. Spaced repetition plus visual/text/auditory learning is a recipe for success.

The possibilities here should not be underestimated. Folks on Hacker News have talked about the value of information commons, and this right here is the next best example behind Wikipedia I have ever encountered. While quality collaborative decks exist for things like medical school, learning languages, and more, none exist specifically for the program I am in (PA school). I am currently creating my own with the goal of it being the core of a quality collaborative deck. I am using Gephi to spatially organize concept maps for diagnoses complete with incidence and strength of associations, when such information is available. I then export these maps to Anki, use Visual Occlusion Enhanced to block out the information I want to recall, and voila: time-efficient first-time learning and long-term retention.

Snowplow parenting too.

10% is a very big deal. We talk about trying to 'eat healthy', but what happens when all your food is becoming less healthy? This is a tragedy of a worldwide commons. Because it's not just rice, extrapolating from it, this is something that affects all plants globally. And it isn't just humans that are affected: this affects the animals that eat plants. What happens to environmentally stressed endangered species who now get less nutrient value from what they eat? This isn't an isolated study: people have been looking at this (albeit with little funding) for 20 years.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953470...

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie...

1. In addition to using public data, they sampled mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes from individuals in diverse geographical locations around the world (456 individuals). This had been done before for mtDNA but not Y chromosomes at anywhere near the level of resolution they attained. Phylogenetic tree analysis is performed to organize the variations into clades and estimate the genetic distance between them.

2. I'm very interested to know the answer to your second point myself. As displayed in figure 2, it looks like it wasn't exactly simultaneous or equal in magnitude everywhere. It does look like most geographic clusters did see something of a drop, at some point. Eyeballing it, it appears that the near-East and the Caucasus had the relatively most-significant drop. The African cluster appears to have had a more modest drop and at a later date. However, I wouldn't rely too heavily on trying to read more into the figures than the authors did (and as I just tried to do).

I suspect the resolving power their data sample gave them was insufficient to resolve your question. While it was enough to demonstrate the existence of such a drop, I would be skeptical of its power to demonstrate the relative severity or timing between each geographical cluster. (If I was the author, this finding would be begging for more grant money to do exactly that: gather more data and nail down exactly how much, when, and where the Y diversity was lost.)

Final point: it's not necessary to assume everyday life was brutal or violent. I'm not an anthropologist, so take my reference to Napoleon Chagnon with a grain of salt. The Amazonian Yanomamo people he lived among had high rates of violent death compared to other causes of death, yet everyday life was peaceful. Most of the bloodshed and conflict he documented occurred over very few days in quick moments. When a population is low, it doesn't take much to move the % up a lot.

Whatever caused the drop in Y diversity, if it happened over several thousand years, the yearly attrition rate could have been very low also.

There's an interesting cognitive bias where people who are intelligent and informed about one domain, try to interpret information outside that domain. This stereotypically affects doctors or engineers making pronouncements of things as laypersons, and underestimating their own ignorance, commit errors without realizing it. Hacker News is an excellent place to get insight on technology. However, the lack of formal training often means that when other domains are discussed, we get armchair biologists or historians. That is happening here. (The loss of Y-diversity is much, much earlier in date than the Late Bronze Age collapse: starts at roughly 10k years ago, with a little variation depending on what part of the globe you are looking at.)

Here's the original article that caused such a stir in 2015. Figure 2 shows the sudden drop in the reproducing Y-population globally (meaning it cannot be explained by genes or migration).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4381518/

The paper cited in the article alters the date of the event, but really there's a lot of uncertainty remaining.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

The best current hypothesis to explain this drop (and that no similar one occurred for the reproducing X-population) is the conflict between predominantly agricultural societies versus predominantly hunter-gatherer societies. Until sufficient evidence has been found to rule out this or alternatives, take any explanation with a grain of salt.

Look at Figure 2, and you'll notice the Y-axis are different. Between 50-10kya, the effective reproductive population was 3-4 times larger for women than men, globally. This fits with modern anthropological evidence of polygyny in early hunter-gatherer cultures (loose polygyny with on average 3-4 wives per successful male over a lifetime, but with limited ability to enforce fidelity). Y chromosome diversity tends to accumulate, albeit at a lower rate than the X.

An agricultural community is likely to be much more homogenous in terms of Y-chromosomes, than a hunter-gatherer one. Power is much more effectively concentrated in these communities, allowing leaders to amass more wives and enforce fidelity much more strictly than in hunter-gatherer societies. Stories of King Solomon's wives, or Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco (who reportedly sired hundreds of children) are an easy way to visualize this.

While man-for-man, a hunter-gatherer may be healthier and stronger, a hunter-gatherer society may find themselves vastly outnumbered by an agricultural community. Over time, hunter-gatherers would find themselves pushed off of prime land onto marginal land. The newer article mentions a founder effect. Where are these Neolithic pioneers coming from and where are they going to? From agricultural communities, expanding into territory previously held by hunter-gatherers. While certainly many deaths occurred due to combat, Y-chromosomal diversity loss also would have occurred to disease and famine. The agricultural population would continue to rise, while the hunter-gatherers would struggle to maintain on more marginal land. History is replete with stories of taking women, so if this scenario is the best explanation, it is unsurprising that there was not a corresponding drop in X-diversity.

This sort of scenario occurred globally. Agriculture independently arose in many places: the near-east, sub-saharan Africa, China, Mexico, the Andes, and possibly others. We've seen what happened to the Americas after Columbus. Similar mechanisms help explain the population-level Y-cide on smaller scales that probably occurred during each of the agricultural expansions above.

This hypothesis, while probably the most widely-accepted at present, is challenged by some of the evidence in the newer paper. It will be interesting to see how it falls out once the original authors have a chance to respond or additional voices join the conversation.

It's not about blaming the 9.9%. It's about convincing the 9.9% that they are part of the problem. The way the author writes, he is in that group, speaking to them. "We."

Compare to slavery. Obviously Southern slaveowners bear responsibility. But were non-slaveowners, Northerners, etc free of the taint? No. Ulysses S. Grant married into a slaveowning family and for years was supported by them. Northern factory owners turned profits off the products of slavery. Regular northerners purchased products produced by the system of slavery. Sure, some are more responsible than others, but the whole country from North to South bore the taint of slavery. Individuals giving up slaves didn't end slavery. Raising awareness of slavery's evil to the point where it hit critical mass, and then using power to force slaveholders to cease, that's how it ended.

This article is a member of the 9.9% speaking to others of the 9.9%, telling them they cannot absolve themselves; that they cannot expect to escape without consequence if the world turns again, as it has in the past.

In my mind the only question left to be addressed is how the power will be wielded. Will it be a politicolegal revolution or a violent one?

Season 1 did have notable audio issues. I found myself having to rewind to understand what was said, and even then it felt like guesswork. I love the show, but do agree with this criticism. Thankfully they straightened it out in later seasons, to the point that I had forgotten about it until I read your comment!

Canids are pretty much a superspecies anyways.

Consider brown bears and polar bears. We consider them 2 species yet they can successfully interbreed. The main reason they don't is that their ranges haven't historically overlapped. Geography, not biology, was the separator. You could view them as one species with a bivariate distribution, in the late stages of diverging into two.

Canids likewise viewed as one species with significant ecological clustering, but divided this time by behavior.

Sounds like 2 things are getting confused.

Think of Ethereum as a very slow decentralized computer. People make mistakes building applications all the time, but this doesn't necessarily mean the underlying language, or for a better comparison, the compiler is at fault. Problems with the underlying language can cause problems with applications, obviously. Programmer error =/= language/compiler error, while both can occur.

People have been talking about the Parity hack like it's Ethereum's fault. Imo that's as absurd as blaming C for your program crashing to your coding error.

Your post, while you are confusing two types of errors, isn't completely off. Solidity does need improving. Any language has to pick tradeoffs, and evolves over time as it becomes apparent what the system's needs are. But Ethereum and Solidity aren't to blame for most of the ETH-based apps that rushed to market without an appropriate level of QA and review, cut corners, made mistakes, and caused catastrophic problems for their users like the Parity bug... this should be ringing bells, folks.