devinhelton

Local labs could develop or purchase their own test kits, but during an a public health emergency, they must get FDA authorization before launching such a test.[1]

This seems to me like a giant institutional and bureaucratic screw up.

Hopefully the FDA may be finally getting its act together and fast-tracking approval of local tests: https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/12330216819181936...

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/cdc-coronavirus-116...

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1231944326827081729.html

The policy I would like to see is that patients should only be legally liable for costs that they sign off on up front (at least for most elective care). It never ceases to bother me that every time I go to the doctor I have no option but to give the hospital a blank check and have to cross fingers that they will not hit me a month later with ridiculous charges.

I don't endorse the book or her particular worldview 100% but I believe she does bring some true evidence to light about the good aspects of meat.

I disagree entirely, but there is no need to relitigate this debate here. If by any chance you have never read the pro-meat argument, the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is a pretty good primer.

Consumer advocates in the past few years have actually done a pretty good job at pressuring the top fast food chains to not dilute their beef with additives.

McD's, Burger King, and Wendy's all advertise their hamburger patties as being nothing but 100% USDA inspected ground beef, salt, and pepper. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html https://menu.wendys.com/en_US/product/daves-double/ https://www.bk.com/food-quality/our-burgers https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y...

It's all the other stuff (the bun, the fries, etc. ) that have preservatives, fillers, and shady additives.

(When traveling, I sometimes just buy a bunch of MdD's patties a la carte. Tasty, nutritious and very filling).

This "impossible burger" trend basically reverses the work of consumer advocates. The one element of fast food that is actually an all-natural, nutritionally complex whole food is replaced with a patty that is nothing but processed food and additives -- https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189374... The fast food restaurant will likely save money -- but because of how fashionable vegetarianism has become, instead of being condemned, they will be actually praised as being eco and health conscious.

"100% Beef Patty. Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper)."

That seems pretty clear to me. USDA defines beef as flesh of cattle. If there is anything but "flesh of cattle" in the patty, McDonald's is committing fraud.

For what it is worth, McDonald's says on their web site that this is not true. So either you are mistaken or McDonald's is committing fraud. Do you have a source for your claim?

From the McD's web site ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/our-food-y... ):

"Every one of our burgers is made with 100% pure beef and cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else—no fillers, no additives, no preservatives."

"Do you use so-called 'pink slime' in your burgers or beef treated with ammonia?"

"Nope. Our beef patties are made from 100% pure beef. Nothing else is added. No fillers, no additives and no preservatives.

"Some consumers may be familiar with the practice of using lean, finely textured beef sometimes treated with ammonia, which is referred to by some as “pink slime.” We do not use this. "

60kg at 1.82m strikes me as really fricking thin. I'm your height, and have considered myself a lean, athletic guy, but at 13% bodyfat I weigh 80kg.

A BMI that low is not a good thing. It is evidence against your diet being optimal. Mortality rates are actually higher when BMI is below 20 (https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2156 https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/353/bmj.i2156/F3.large.jpg -- although causality is not established). And from a common sense or aesthetic perspective, such a low BMI almost certainly means you lack ideal muscle mass.

I just find it disconcerting that the New York Times publishes an article like this, without any acknowledgement that it has been pushing a different conclusion for the past eight years. I get that that this article is from a different author, but when people go to the New York Times, they are usually trusting the overall institution and editorial controls more than the byline. I also get that new studies comes in and the evidence changes -- but that still requires some sort of acknowledgement that they were wrong before.

If a cost is evenly moderately costly to create, and abusive comments quickly result in bans, then the ratio of abusers quickly goes down to a very low level.

The problem is that making it costly to sign up goes against the business model and growth model of sites like Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram.

I don't think the system is working well at all. We have a situation where vague laws with severe penalties allow prosecutors to grossly overcharge. This is then used to coerce the accused into waiving their rights to a trial, in return for the certainty of a more limited punishment.

What does this even mean? A claim means that I can turn in the piece of paper and get something back. I can turn in my coat check claim paper and get my coat back. Under a gold standard, I can turn in my paper bill and get gold back. But we are no longer under a gold standard. What is the thing I get back with regards to a dollar?

The actual thing bootstrapping the value of a dollar is that the dollar is legal tender for paying taxes and for "all debts public and private." The dollar isn't a claim against the government -- it's a token than can extinguish the government's claim over you.

I agree though that existing banks could technically implement costless transfers or accounts for people outside the US with existing tech, but it is not worth it because of regulatory compliance issues and the archaic nature of the banking systems. But if those issues were to be fixed, might as well just hold what are now checking accounts directly with the government, rather than have the convoluted system of banks + massive regulation + FDIC insurance.

What I don't understand is:

1) Why the US government would make a brand new currency rather than just support holding existing US dollars in digital form.

2) Why crypto-currency is needed. The crypto aspects of bitcoin are needed to support the fully decentralized processing. If you the currency is centrally controlled anyways, might as well just use an ordinary database with good transaction logging.

Hmm, but ultimately the money still comes from the target audience anyway, right? The advertiser only pays to reach a given audience if that audience is going to buy enough product to pay back the cost of advertising. Maybe you could make the argument that the really poor Facebook users are essentially drafting off of imperfectly targeted advertising?

I think the real reason for the advertising model is that Facebook is more valuable the more people use it. So it started charging money, maybe only 1/4rd of the users actually pay, the other very casual users just use the fee as an excuse to finally stop using Facebook. But now with such an exodus, the paying people don't want to pay anymore, and then you have a death spiral.

What's an example to you of an article on a hot-point issue where you think the quality of their journalism was superb? And how do you know the quality of their journalism in that article was superb?

I have noticed that on topics that I have independent knowledge of, particularly topics relating to race, sex, or politics, I often find their reporting to be slanted and misleading. They care more about selecting anecdotes and statistics to fit the narrative, rather than starting from the perspective of picking representative anecdotes and a full composite of statistics that give you the actual truth of the matter.

Is "working with Promise instead of being in jail" only for people who are in jail pre-trial? Or will you be trying to do this for people who have been convicted of actual crimes?

I agree 100% as long as you put me, or people of my worldview, in charge of the curriculum and personnel.

But -- some percent of the population are predatory, or have the potential to become predatory. They have come to believe that the strong (them) have the right to take from the weak. They steal, rob, rape, murder because it benefits themselves to do so. And if you take away any prospect of bad consequences, more people will become predators.

I also think our current prison system is a pretty awful. But if you take it away, what would you do with criminals instead? What do you do with the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint, or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her? I think there are alternatives out there, but IMO they must involve punishment (to deter others) and containment/supervision (to prevent the criminal from preying upon others again). My own preference for punishing something like armed robbery would be something like a sentence of 10 years of doing farm labor followed by a three year gradual reintegration into society.

This is a very slippery argument. The overall point of the essay is to show that basing one's currency on a metallic standard is silly and destructive. In this quote, the author is correct in that rarely in history has the monetary unit been permanently and inalterably fixed to an exact weight of metal. But -- it has been the norm in history to have a substantial precious metal content in money, with that content being fixed in the short term, and any lessening of the amount leading to charges of debasement, and possibly even the refusal to accept the currency.

The reason why precious metals have been an important part of money is trust -- an issue which the author fails to address. It takes a very strong government to make its subjects accept fiat currency. If the sovereign pays his soldiers in fiat currency, the soldiers know that the sovereign can infinitely dilute the currency, making the currency worthless. Whereas if the sovereign pays in coin containing precious metal, the soldier knows the precious metal is likely to be of value in many markets, no matter what the sovereign does. And by requiring money to be made from previous metals, it slows down the rate at which the sovereign can debase the currency (although of course the sovereign can and does slowly reduce the metal content).

If you trust your a particular government (or organization, or corporation) completely, then the author's arguments make sense, and you can accept the scrip of that government as currency. But if you don't trust that government completely... then you need a more complete assessment of the pros and cons of different monetary arrangements.

No, I prefer poorly targeted ads. Seeing ads for stuff I might want to buy is more distracting, more tempting, and forces me to expend my limited supply of willpower to resist the temptation.

Well, they did call what Damore wrote "sexual harassment" and "discriminatory", and sexual harassment is illegal and violates EEO, so that is basically saying that what he wrote is unlawful:

"The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these cases. [His] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers."

Whereas we associate having children and schooling with positive externalities -- the creation of an educated workforce that will keep our country strong and prosperous in the next decades. So we intuit that if people responded to the tax by having fewer kids or unschooling the kids, that would be bad for society. (I personally don't actually think that public school produces positive externalities but I'm extremely unusual in that belief).

The other complication is that "good schools" are really the schools with the best students and best parents. With road congestion toll you are paying for an inherently limited resource -- wide, paved right-of-ways enabling leading connecting population hubs. Whereas with the limited number of "good" schools in NYC, the inherently limited resource is the good students themselves. So a "good school" tax is essentially charging good students to be around people like themselves, which is kind of a weird thing todo.