earthtourist

Besides the U.S. Navy videos, there's only one video (out of hundreds I've seen) that has me genuinely wondering if it might be real evidence of an advanced vehicle (aliens or not). It seems to match this American Airpline pilot's description in some ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-91Nobn2xk

Anyone have any guesses?

Best guess I've seen was that it was a supply canister or drop tank. But it seems to pause in mid-air at 0:32, travel horizontally, and is over a civilian area where it seems unlikely that something would be dropped. It does look somewhat like a cruise missle but a lot slower.

The Patriot Act was not inherently time-limited. A virus will have an end at some point through a vaccine or therapies. Terrorism does not have any end. In fact it is timeless.

If you want to convert this from a contentless ad hominem to an actual argument feel free to point to some relevant examples in history, if you can.

You seem to have two basic arguments:

1. That the lock downs were unnecessary/ineffective.

And since the evidence and experts disagree with you, it seems incredibly dubious that you're right. As with climate change denial, there is always some minority taking the contrarian view, but the scientific consensus should still rule the day.

And even if it does turn out to be true, it was still the scientific consensus during an emergency, so it made sense to do it as the best available option. We can't undo the lock downs and we're already working to phase them out. So there's really no cogent argument here.

Also, the comparisons to the flu are a sign you don't have your facts straight. Expert models predicted the potential for millions of dead Americans without intervention. And it seems entirely backed up by the actual data we got from New York.

You also don't seem to understand that flattening the curve reduces death, it doesn't just spread it out over time.

2. That the lock downs are bad for freedom.

This is entirely based on the slippery slope argument. You can't actually point to any governmental abuse, at all. Every government official seems to be acting entirely in good faith across a massive country. Which is why no reasonable person is worried about this. The people protesting the lock downs are a tiny minority of extremists and contrarians.

You have to ask yourself "am I being too extreme in my views, or is every educated/informed person blind to the danger?" and it's pretty obvious which of these is the case.

There is simply no justified cause for concern that lock downs are going to become a tool of oppression. The lock downs are happening with the consent of the people and the courts.

And it's extremely time-limited, not open-ended. There is absolutely no way the lock downs will go on indefinitely. And there is no way they will happen again without the consent of the people. There is simply no reasonable cause for alarm.

P.S.

I would expect your position on allowing people to poison their fellow citizens with radioactive material might be similar to your position on poisoning people with a deadly virus. That would be consistent with the extremist views you're espousing.

It is a huge hammer and this is a huge problem. We normally arrest people for endangering the public. People not abiding by the lock down are clearly endangering the public. They should be arrested.

I don't see any slippery slope or danger of totalitarian take over. The virus is inherently time-limited.

Your personal liberty ends where my nose begins.

When it comes to rights, we always have to ask "what are the reasonable trade-offs?". There are no absolute rights, even in the U.S.

Most people believe it's clearly reasonable that we lock down our cities to prevent mass death. The economic pain is great, and it's very inconvenient for all, but it's much better than mass death.

You're entirely free to read/watch/do anything you want in your home, you can exercise, talk to anyone about anything you want, get food, take care of essential things.

You're not free to risk killing many people just so you can enjoy leisure activities. That would be privileging your personal liberty over the lives of your fellow citizens. And, incidentally, you would be depriving some of them of their personal liberty by virtue of killing them...

Does it bother you that you can't own significant quantities of radioactive material and carry them around while you're in public? Clearly laws forbidding this are an infringement of personal liberty. But they're an incredibly reasonable infringement so it doesn't bother you, I'd assume.

A democratic society should be governed by the people. We, The People, have decided that the lock downs are good. We have in effect demanded and endorsed them. So you're disagreeing with the majority of your fellow citizens, not some dictator.

For some unknown reason you believe these lock downs are unreasonable, without any clear rationale.

The local government is doing what the majority of its citizens want it to do. This is exactly the purpose of having a government.

Every libertarian I know believes governments should provide intervention in these kinds of situations. If you don't, that makes you an anarchist (or whatever).

IIRC this is why the U.S. military (in certain cases?) uses a pre-generated list of code names. If you let humans do the code names, they'll choose names that leak info.

I wonder how it is cleaned. Parts of it look like they might be hard to clean effectively. Is it water resistant and capable of being (safely) sprayed down with a disinfectant?

I like the idea of supersonic passenger jets existing again. I'm not sure I really see the point though.

Would you rather fly in business class comfort for 8 hours or with less comfort for 4 hours? Almost doesn't seem worth the expense and risk of going supersonic.

I would be so much more excited about an airplane that was large enough that economy class seating was as comfortable as business class seating is today. That would be much more revolutionary.

I would also get excited about an airplane that was vastly safer than the already-quite-safe airplanes we have.

An airplane with a fail-safe fuselage that can disconnect from the rest of the plane, parachute to the ground and land (or float) safely. This could potentially eliminate fire danger by jettisoning everything flammable (gas filled wings, engines, cockpit, and whatever else).

The fact that flying is uncomfortable and still-too-scary to millions of people are the biggest opportunities for innovation that I see.

Flying at 500+ MPH is already quite fast given the size of the planet.

Yes, and no one should try to play competitive games across a continent. Competitions must be regional. Internet latency is great within a few hundred miles.

You can't run a server for yourself for most games. You have to sign into a proprietary service to download/run games. We already lost this battle. I'd like to at least get some advantages like less cheating!

The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating.

The problem historically has been that game clients have access to a lot of game state that enables cheats. With a "thin client" like Google Stadia, there should be a lot less opportunity for hacks. The incoming game data is an audio/video stream, which makes many hacks hard/impossible.

It would be great to play FPS games without any cheaters, they can easily spoil an otherwise amazing game. Maybe future online tournaments will be cloud gaming only.

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing.

The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire.

Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school".

Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.

I've really enjoyed this series. I do wish they just told stories about developing their games without the contrived framing of every one as a "near death" story. It's just unnecessary and rings pretty false in most cases. It feels a bit like tricking non-technical people as well.

Despite that flaw, I do like it. I hope they keep em coming.

Of course there are productivity boosters. The dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, vehicles, computerized booking, and many other pieces of technology have replaced the need for many additional workers.

The problem is that, as states, we are not translating these increased profits into increased quality of life for citizens. UBI is the most obvious way to start doing it.

What we want is to in effect charge companies in relation to how much profit they're making off replacing workers (increasing productivity). When a company is able to replace 10 workers with technology, they should pay at least enough taxes for 5 workers to live off UBI. Repeat until everyone that wants to can live comfortably off UBI. While other people voluntarily work to make a lot more money than UBI.

Real heros exist. But only children believe they are infallible.

As the pretend hero, Malcolm Reynolds, said "It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another."

Unless the spread was much faster in some areas than others due to population density, for instance. Back to the confounding variables question...

1. Early mass testing might have have flooded hospitals with scared people, the same way it seem to in Italy. Whether it was incompetence or reluctance, it may have been a positive thing that there wasn't mass testing.

2. Containment wasn't seen as a viable strategy among virtually any free and democratic country. Locking citizens up in apartment buildings wasn't considered an option. What free country has achieved containment? Maybe South Korea?

3. The U.S. national stock pile had millions of PPE and 12,000+ ventilators. The U.S. miltary also supplied thousands of ventilators. I'll ask again: which other countries had comparable national stockpiles?

4. Commercial cargo is extremely expensive currently which means demand is high and supply is constrained. I'll ask again: which countries have their own fleet of global-reach cargo planes?

5. Okay it's "just a floating hospital" so how many other countries have fully equipped hospitals they can float into port within days?

6. Is everyone's version of a field hospital up to the specifications of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers? I doubt the U.S. field hospitals are inferior to any country's.

7. The FDA and CDC has been working with drug and testing companies quite competently, as far as I can tell. Other countries will almost certainly benefit from the work the U.S. FDA/CDC are doing.

8. The Abbot Labs test is in use, and it matters now. Again, who else had such sophisticated tests so quickly?

You (and many others) seem to be watching a lot of news media that is designed to entertain you, so you keep watching. It's not a bad thing that the U.S. is held to a higher standard but you shouldn't be ignorant that you're holding it to a higher standard. And you should keep your facts straight. Otherwise you risk buying into a narrative that, while entertaining or appealing to your biases, may be largely false.

Everyone knew what was happening in China. The starting line was the same for all countries. I became 100% sure we were in for a hospital-overrunning pandemic by mid-January. I can tell because that's when I started emailing friends/family telling them to stock up for a quarantine.

By that metric, California is doing 10x better than Switzerland with 4x the population. And 10x better than the UK with 0.6x the population.

There are so many variables involved that it's hard to know how to rationally compare different regions. How much is demographics, population density, and other variables vs competence.

I'm basing my comments on data: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

In what way did the U.S. "completely drop the ball"?

As far as I can tell there are two things that could have been done better:

1. Much more funding for the National Stockpile of PPE and ventilators.

2. An early attempt to do a lock down.

Testing could have been done faster, but given that no attempt was made at containment, this likely would not have made any difference. It may have made things worse in some cases.

How many other countries even have a National Stock pile with PPE and ventilators? How many have cargo planes flying supplies? Hospital ships sent to hot spots? Field hospitals like the ones designed by U.S. Army Corp of Engineers? An organization with the capabilities of the CDC? The rapid-testing from Abbot Labs?

The U.S. has done a reasonably competent job as far as I can tell. The U.S. has a very good expert leading the federal response, in Dr. Fauci. How many countries have such an expert in charge of their response?

You're espousing an unfounded conspiracy theory based on a very forced interpretation of one person's offhanded remark.

Instantly disprovable with facts:

1. NY is not politically aligned with Trump in the least. They have received a huge amount of federal support.

2. Los Angeles is not politically aligned with Trump, they have also received significant federal support.

This kind of intellectual dishonesty among the anti-Trump is as shocking as Trump's own level of intellectual dishonesty.

No question it's been suboptimal but "insanely incompetent" seems a stretch. The most logical comparison would be to other similar countries. The U.S. handling seems to have been much better than UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Iran. Similar to Denmark, Austria, Germany, etc.

South Korea and China seem to be doing well but if they don't achieve herd immunity, and other states do, they might end up prolonging their pain significantly. Although they'll probably be better off because they'll have time to prepare and benefit from medical advances.

It's hard to judge while we're in the middle of this. The demographics and cultural habits probably play a big role. The reports generated after this is all over will tell us who did what well. I predict the U.S. response will be shown to have been much too slow, lacking in sufficent preparation, but not insanely incompetent when compared globally.

Why not in practice? One of the positive features of this pandemic is that the infection is peaking at different times across cities. That means it should be possible to surge PPE/ventilators/personnel to the hot spots, and shift those resources over time.

Anyone who disagrees with this strategy should suggest an alternative. Allowing life-saving supplies to sit unused in hospital stockpiles while people die seems like a pretty stupid alternative.

Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people back to work with relatively low risk.

Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15 minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is uninfected.

I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate the tests and test machines correctly.

The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while supplies are limited.

The word "spy" isn't specific enough. It's enough to say that you don't want your Fourth Amendment rights violated.

It should be possible to do mass surveillance of Covid-19 without violating people's rights. It's just an additional constraint that other countries don't have. It will require some alternative approaches.

Careful giving medical advice. Fasting can be dangerous in some cases.

The advice I got from my doctor is to start with 24 hour fasts. And then try 48 hours. And then probably stop there.

(I am not a medical expert)

Our legal system does usually involve "proving damages".

Obtaining autonomous vehicle IP is not equivalent to having autonomous vehicle product in the market.

As an example: Boeing could almost certainly publish all of the IP for the 787 jet and not risk spawning a single legitimate competitor. Very few organizations in the world could do anything with it.

What's truly valuable to a Google or Boeing is their financial, engineering, manufacturing, and operations resources. And other less tangible things.

Which is why severe punishment for illegally copying IP doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes, it should be illegal and should be stopped, but it's not that big a deal in most cases.

It just seems like a big deal because "tHey StolE tHe SeCreT cOdEs!" as if it's a James Bond movie.

It's a case of confusing the golden goose with the golden eggs.