gingerbread-man

Why not a pigouvian tax on jet fuel (and other fossil fuels?)

Does a ‘shallow article’ even merit a dismissive comment? Wouldn’t it be better simply to ignore it and find another thread on which to engage?

I read this in disbelief, picturing a uniformed INS employee drawing vials of blood in some poorly sanitized strip mall. It turns out US green card applicants are required to show proof of vaccinations and undergo a physical exam by performed by USCIS certified physician. For adults, the exam includes a blood test for syphilis. Source: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/find-a-civil-surgeon

I stumbled upon this site when researching flight control algorithms for small UAVs. It appears to be an out-of-date reference for commercial pilots seeking type ratings for the Airbus A320 family. Link to a collection of A320 system schematics and diagrams: http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_studyaids.htm

Gross daily trading volumes are a poor gauge of how much capital investors have deployed in a particular market, seeking returns. A single international transaction may induce several forex trades, such as when the sale price of goods is denominated in USD or some other non-local currency. Combine that with the complex, usually leveraged hedging strategies employed by banks and multinational firms, and it’s easy to see whence such a massive figure comes.

Am I crazy, or is this a reference to one of the cheat codes on Age of Empires?

Alzheimer’s is a neurological disease with a well-documented physiological pathology and terminal prognosis. Mental illnesses generally lack both of those things. The ethics of assisted suicide for terminal patients are distinct, I think, and it’s understandable than terminal patients were the first to have this right recognized under law.

Wouldn't the lack of means to contact all of your users, immediately and directly, create other compliance challenges? You would be unable to notify users of a data breech until their next login; former users might be left permanently in the dark. Similarly, being unable to push legally mandated notice of policy updates could be an impossible challenge. I can see how this proposed scheme could work day to day, but you would likely be well served to retain un-hashed emails in cold storage.

Speaking only for myself, I found this article to be particularly difficult to comprehend. If there are any physicians or molecular biologists who could more plainly summarize the authors' conclusions, I would greatly appreciate it.

From what I can gather: — SARS-CoV-2 uses ACE2 in the alveolar epithelium as an entry receptor. ACE2 may also be involved in regulating cytokine activity and in viral replication. — "Pro-inflammatory cytokines have a central role in the progression of COVID-19 infection." — Anti-cytokine therapy may help reduce pulmonary inflammation in C19 patients. — ACE2 is also present in the leydig (testosterone producing) cells of male rats. — Long-term smokers express higher levels of ACE2 in their lungs. COPD patients are more likely to have low testosterone levels. And low testosterone has been linked to increased Pro-inflammatory cytokine activity. ——> Maybe testosterone reduces inflammation and, by extension, mortality, in COVID-19 patients? (I still do not really understand how the production of ACE2 in the leydig cells is related to this.)

Or, on the high-testostetone side: — Androgen receptors activate the transcription of TMPRSS2, a transmembrane serine protease found primarily in prostate epithelium. — "TMPRSS2 activity is regarded as essential for viral spread and pathogenesis in the infected hosts." ——> Elevated testosterone in some young men may increase TMPRSS2 activation, and be a common cause in the relatively small number of severe cases in that age group.

That's a rather misleading statement. Discretionary spending makes up less than a third of the federal budget. Defense spending works out to about 15% of federal spending overall. Confusion seems to arise because mandatory spending programs (like social security, medicare, medicaid, and the VA) are budgeted separately, as is the interest paid on federal government debt.

The United States spent $609 billion on defense last year. Surely it's possible to make the case for DOD cutbacks without misleading statistics.

Most ad tech companies (Google, FB) likely devote well under 10% of their engineering might to work directly related to the advertising that forms their revenue stream.

Newspapers and magazines are ad-funded, too, but few would consider the work of journalists to be wasteful.

“'I would say that a robot is a physically embodied artificially intelligent agent that can take actions that have effects on the physical world,' says roboticist Anca Dragan of UC Berkeley." [https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-a-robot/]

Industrial robots and Roombas may fit this definition, because they are controlled by fairly sophisticated software that synthesizes inputs from arrays of sensors to perform complex physical tasks. But less advanced machines like dishwashers and garage-door openers don't really reach that level.

Garage door openers do take input from an optical "obstruction" sensor, but the response is binary: don't close the door. In contrast, robotic vacuums translate distance sensor readings into a motion plan to cover every square foot of your room while avoiding obstacles.

There's another advantage for which human workers that don't get nearly enough much credit: flexibility.

When Tesla tried to create the world's most automated assembly line for the Model 3, they learned the hard way why Toyota and others have abandoned the idea: complex automated systems are, perhaps necessarily, tightly coupled and complicated. For Tesla, this led to cascading errors and insurmountable "debugging" challenges. Eventually it became evident to Tesla and Musk that, even at first-world prices, human workers were the better buy. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips...]

When you think about it, the work involved in building software systems may only be economically justifiable right now because computers can perform certain tasks many orders of magnitude more efficiently than humans can. In the physical realm, the differences shrink tremendously (or even reverse), making it far more difficult to compete with human workers.

Speaking for myself, I generally prefer to learn at my own pace studying from books than from lectures and a standardized curriculum. But the issue here is value vs. risk: Lambda provides greater value (instructors, curriculum, etc...), but their income share amount is similar because it needn't account for the (presumably) higher risk of failure with self-study.

This is for people who would prefer to teach themselves.

$42 on Amazon is a huge ripoff. I think it's about $20 a bottle at my local Asian grocery store. I like it, but I don't have "super taster" powers either so take that for what you will.

Because Google can extract value from captchas, it makes world-class captchas and bot detection AI available to every webmaster for free. I don't know what that level of service would otherwise cost, but it almost certainly wouldn't be affordable for low-traffic blogs and the like, which would end up vulnerable using weaker captchas or trying to roll their own. Everywhere else the cost would just get passed on to users.

I don't love the compromise of paying for things with my data or by training Google's AI, but it's hard to say users aren't getting anything out of it. That said, I do miss the old reCaptcha.

The payday lending industry operates within an intrinsically challenging ethical landscape. Their customers are generally poor, often desperate, and proportionately vulnerable. But payday lenders also don't operate within a vacuum: often the costs of high-interest-rate loans are dwarfed by comparison to the late-payment fees charged by credit cards, landlords, insurance companies, doctors offices, auto lenders, bank overdrafts, etc... As the saying goes, it's expensive to be poor. In one survey of payday loan customers performed by GWU Business School, 89% of borrowers said they were "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied" with their most recent payday loan. [1] No one wants to be in that situation, but for some, payday loans are the best or only option.

It's one thing to call out the kind of deliberately predatory behavior that has thrived in the payday lending industry, but it seems like Earnin is earnestly trying to provide a service that many Americans outside (and inside) the Bay Area fall back on, in the fairest and least-predatory way possible. As far as I'm concerned, that's something to be applauded, not scorned.

[1] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/payday_lending_r...

The most significant regulatory change following the Colgan crash was the added requirement that all airline (Part 21) first officers possess an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate prior to hiring. Previously, only captains (as pilots-in-command) were required to hold that certificate, which requires a minimum 1500 hours of flight experience. [1]

In practical terms, this wasn't a big change (insurance underwriters already required it), but 1500 hours is a significant hurdle at at time when the US is facing a shortage of pilots.

[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/news/faa-finalizes-atp-rule-first-...

Could someone please help explain the technical details of this?

From what I can gather from the chrome.webRequest and chrome.declarativeNetRequest documentation, it looks like this change would make it difficult to have long lists of blocked hosts, or perhaps to update such lists automatically. Obviously there is a conflict of interest here for Google, but it looks like there are at least a few non-bogus justifications for the proposed change.

See also (especially the section "Comparison with the webRequest API): https://developers.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetReque...

A lot of progress has been made since the 2003 passage of "PREA," the Prison Rape Elimination Act. https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/about/prison-rape-elimina...

Anecdotal: When I went through police training several years ago, one of our instructors was a former jail capitan. I've never met anyone in my life who took sexual assault and sexual assault prevention more seriously.

It's worth noting that commercial airlines are exempted from paying any taxes on fuel worldwide by treaty. [1]

While this may eventually change, in the short term, airlines probably have less to fear about carbon taxes than any other industry.

[1] https://www.markey.senate.gov/GlobalWarming/files/LTTR/ACES/...

A very good point. But if that were the only impediment, I suspect Microsoft could come up with a rollout plan to mitigate (though not completely eliminate) this problem. Releasing a "preview" of the kernel source to trusted security researchers and academics might be a start.

I was thinking more that an open-source kernel could result in unix-y distros e.g. Arch Windows.

Here's a dopey idea: What if Microsoft open-sourced the Windows NT kernel? (While retaining some proprietary drivers, etc..)

If handled well, a community would blossom around "NT," with multiple "unofficial" distros (maybe one with full POSIX compatibility), and lots and lots of happy developers. If things went really well, they might even achieve the resources necessary to create Windows Phone 2.0.

Microsoft could still make money from consumer/enterprise support plans (i.e. AppleCare), and via commissions on sales in the Windows app store. And an open-source Windows could lead to growth as a cloud OS, driving revenue for MS Azure.

Open sourcing the Windows kernel would be the ultimate culmination of Microsoft's turnaround, and IMHO a fair penance for evil deeds past. Nothing could do more to invigorate the open-source community. I would be so delighted I might even start to use Bing! It's never going to happen, but it is a very pleasant dream. Far better than "One Kernel to Rule them All!"

Joyent's cloud (and the open-source software they use to run it!) is notable b/c they don't run containers inside VMs. Instead, they use illumos zones to secure multiple tenants running on a single host os and bare metal server. It sounds like that offers quite an advantage in performance.

I'm surprised no one from Google has made a full-throated defense of this project. Not that I personally agree with it, but there is a case to be made that projects like Dragonfly embody the longstanding US policy of "constructive engagement" with China. It's not hard to imagine Hennessy or Pichai extolling the virtues of compromise and highlighting a handful of key concessions from the Chinese gov't.

Why haven't we heard that? Either 1) Even Google's leadership doesn't believe this has any moral upside, only financial, or 2) They can't so much as admit that they're making concessions to an authoritarian regime, for fear of offending said regime. Both explanations betray remarkable moral cowardice.