Noseshine

The problem was mostly in the cities though.

I remember I returned from my parents where I had stayed over the weekend and it was okay - to a city that was still glowing from the heat at 11 pm at night. I say that as someone who spent a summer vacation in the Emirates (that place has cooled swimming pools right at the beaches, and for good reason the Gulf water is not warm but unbearably hot!).

In general, if/when global warming picks up we have to make some major changes to all our cities. As they are now they are giant furnaces and heat batteries with all the exposed concrete and asphalt.

Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying.

I (a German) do the exact same thing! I don't even find Fox News stories particularly egregious, it's more in what stories they choose, but it's not any worse than WP or German news, only different. The discussion forums are much harder to bear though, but there is at least one major German newspaper (FAZ) that has very normal articles but a Fox News like crowd in the forums too (but they express themselves much better). WP seems to be a single-issue website these days, it's Trump, Trump, Trump drowning out every other topic. The other articles they still have left are just a side-show. It's waaayyyyy too extreme for my taste.

EDIT: Oh I get it. Should have responded AFTER the morning espresso.

Free excellent courses:

Start with "Fundamentals of Neuroscience" by Harvard, free multimedia course that requires only a high school level education:

https://www.mcb80x.org/

then go to

"Medical Neuroscience" on Coursera (the professor is a great teacher):

https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience

Especially the 2nd course is pretty big, on of the largest online courses there is in terms of videos to watch and things to learn. But while it is a lot it is much easier than the quantum mechanics course(s) half the size on edX. You don't have to think much, just listen and learn.

Aft hat you have a very solid foundation, now check out more such courses on the same platform.

the government is funneling an ever-greater percentage of revenue from productive pursuits to pensions

That is too simplistic for me. Income for one also is income for somebody else down the line.

All those "economic" considerations I read about - not just on this topic - remind me of my extremely lousy chess play: Never think more than a single step ahead.

But the economy is a circle. All those views are form the PoV of an individual entity - income and expenses, and where it comes from and where it goes "does not matter".

But to look at the economy is completely different! Here you have to look at the entire circle, not at just a single piece of the chain.

For example, giving old people money, directly or indirectly, leads to an increased flow of money through systems of the economy that are utilized by old people. That would be the health sector most of all, not a lot of change in housing or food (they already had a roof to live under before they retired and they won't eat more food than before). Maybe tourism benefits too.

What happens if they get less money? What sector(s) benefit(s), who loses?

The purely financial considerations don't make sense to me on the greater economic level. Is the economy suddenly unable to maintain the housing and produce sufficient food because some numbers in some balance sheets are off? That happened a lot in history. My own grand parents lived with at least five different currencies within their lifetime without moving (Germany). We found that "finance" can easily be reset provided people are willing to do so (that's the important part) - what matters is factories, knowledge, culture, trade, etc.

There certainly are a lot of problems of high pensions (compared to non-pensioners), for example if the old people end up with a larger share of the available housing, which includes not just housing they themselves use but also housing they control (investments) because that funnels even more of the money flow through the economy through the control of (some relatively few) old people. that may no lead to a housing shortage, after all who owns housing does not seem so important as long as there is enough, but a consequence is that young(er) people feel insecure in their outlook and are more reluctant to have a family. Also, the kinds of housing being built is probably different when done purely as an investment.

As for the health sector, I'm not sure how bad it is to have it deal (even more) with old people's problems. After all, aging is everybody's problem at some point and if that leads to progress, be it symptom control or some day even more direct control of aging I don't see why getting more of the economy's money flow to go through that sector would be bad. After all if "cost control" was the overwhelming argument then collective suicide would be the best solution. Since we are alive and like it that way we may as well "waste" our resources on just that.

We have that wonderful tool "money" and "finance", but I think too many people have forgotten that it is a tool and treat it like a natural law and the be-all and end-all. We actually have much greater control - and much more arbitrary control than a lot of people think - over how we use the tool. Unfortunately only severe crisis opens the minds of people enough to wield the power we actually have over our own creation.

With a demographic that is the inverse of the "voter turnout by age" graphic though [0].

[0] http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics

which would be a huge business model change,

Is it? Since Adobe switched to the subscription model and the "Adobe Creative Cloud" I'd say they would be quite happy if that infrastructure would be good enough to run their very big application suite(s). Not to mention the savings of not having to support two major platforms (and several OS versions for each) - even realizing them only partially would be big. Of course, given the size of their product I'd say there is little use in talking about this at this point, the web platform would have to mature a lot more first.

I prefer the (open source) videospeed Chrome extension [0]. It gives me a much wider range (thus far I used up to 5 x speed; audio is blanked above 3 x speedup), 0.1 increments - and keyboard control. The latter is essential to me, I can watch sections of online lectures at high speed and quickly slow down without fumbling for the mouse to watch the few sections that demand more attention at lower speed.

[0] https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

Obviously the example code is inside another function - `await` can only be used inside a function marked with `async`, which always returns a promise.

That means error handling may not be necessary inside that function. Errors are caught automatically and returned to the caller as rejected promise! You need error handling at the top level but not necessarily inside each function.

You make sure the material is "boring" so that you can concentrate on what the talk is really about: The people in front of you. They change every time, sometimes radically (composition of the audience and context). You want to waste as little conscious thought as possible when it comes to the material you are presenting so that you are free to dedicate yourself to the audience.

How boring does it get for a painter to use the same kinds of brushes for all their paintings? Or for a musician to use the exact same instrument? It doesn't, because they are not what you focus on.

It may get boring to minimally refactor the same code twenty times -- the code is the focus of the action. When giving a talk about the code the focus is what you want to achieve with people, not with code.

If you are there and really only care about the thing you want to present instead of the people in front of you then sure, they will probably notice.

Disclaimer:

This goes along with the other sub-thread here about the value of recording talks. What I say above is more about talks that are about convincing and motivating people. I don't mean that as in "motivational speeches" at all, but an Apple keynote about their new products is in that category. You want to give people a "look behind the scenes", at the person, because technology fails if the people and/or organization(s) fail no matter the quality of the technology. If the talk is about the latest internal optimizations of the V8 Javascript runtime giving the talk once and then point to the recording, or even just a lengthy blog post may actually be better and the main reason there is a talk is "the conference is there anyway and why not". But that's the kind of talk I would put only minimal effort into and it still works, because I don't need to convince and engage people, only to inform them.

Without knowing anything about the CIA specifically but about big organizations incl. government ones:

I suspect 99% of the employees have jobs comparable to what you see in the daily Dilbert cartoons, and they sit in aging offices with outdated equipment (unless it's just after a rare new-stuff purchase wave), and they spend 90% of their time fighting the bureaucracy, creating, filing and reading reports, and "internal politics" on all levels. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's not like they have a razor-sharp focus for each and every employee (just like any other large organization) and most of live for anybody is just to muddle through somehow.

I once participated in a big project for the foreign ministry of a big European country. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to place the icons everybody should see by default so that they didn't cover essential parts of the country's symbols shown as default background image... when I suggested to an employee with half-inch thick glasses who placed his eyes like three inches from the monitor that I could decrease the resolution of his desktop so that everything would get bigger he refused because he thought he had to cope with whatever he was told, and if the higher ups declared default screen resolution to be X * Y it was not his place to select a different one...

Anyway, I liked everybody, it was great fun. It's just a bunch of humans after all ;-)

Indeed. Fortunately there is a filter-list [0] for my ad blocker with the sole purpose of blocking these EU cookie warnings :-)

[0] List homepage: http://prebake.eu/

Here is why the startup I write code for wants an app first and browser code second.

We actually would prefer the browser by leaps and bounds, cutting the need for central servers and decentralization is a core idea, you should remain in control of all your data.

The problem: The only viable way to store a significant amount of data in the browser is IndexedDB. Which allows you only some storage of the total available - and, much much worse, the browser can wipe the data at any time without warning.

It simply is not possible to provide our data-storage related system without either a central server backing up the browser "app" - or writing an app for iOS and Android.

I think so too. In our recent conflicts when you were caught you might get shot, the ancients used torture-killing so cruel I can't even read about it without feeling sick. Not even the Nazis used something like the Brazen Bull (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull), and that's just a simple device and procedure, they were much more inventive than that in the past. 1000 years ago those involved in the assassination attempt on "Der Führer" would have faced far more horrible deaths than they actually got. It seems to me even the most evil Nazis didn't have 1% of the imagination of the ancients (possibly excluding Dr. Josef Mengele, but he didn't think a about how to create pain, he just didn't care if his subjects did).

And everybody takes inspiration for everything from somebody else and it can all be traced back to ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome. Yes we get it, nothing is an original idea.

Thought experiment: To be truly "original" a child that grew up with wolves in the jungle would have to come up with it (okay, not even that since it learns from the wolves). Everything else is "not truly original". Duh.

Now that we have established that no truly "original" ideas exist in any human's head (assuming "original" means going from totally empty, nothingness, to the idea), can we just get rid of all comments pointing out that X didn't really invent Y but was inspired by P?

Of course, what I just wrote isn't original in the slightest, I just don't know the names of all the people who said it before.

Even if the book is fine

There is the crux of your... argument. How about you read the book and then come back? You sure have a lot to say about something you never looked at.

You can't improve how "the other side" is arguing (or not arguing), but you sure have 100% control over your own behavior and discussion habits. Attacking the people instead of the work is as bad as it gets, especially if you never even set eye on the latter. I won't read it either, but I don't have an opinion about it that I'm trying to share.

Yes, he did. It was specific.

It was specific about the authors, but the question was about specifics of the book. Still not one bit of information about the book in sight in this sub-thread.

I don't care either way, as a bored HN reader going through this and that thread I just noticed the discrepancy, and while I have nothing to say about the subject being discussed I am able to see that the discussion itself does not have much substance but lots of partisan voting in lieu of substance. Come on guys, you do what you routinely accuse the other side of doing.

I've tried to learn some quantum physics for fun, and it seems to me that most textbooks have surprisingly little description of the actual physical experiments behind the physics.

Try the free and new course "Quantum Mechanics for Everyone" that despite the title is certainly not dumbed down at all, on edX.

https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-everyone-george...

They do? Just check the version: Open Defender, go to Help => About, check "Engine Version". Should be 1.1.13704.0 or higher.

Businesses hate instability.

Which ones? How many billions of GDP are created by arms manufacturers directly and indirectly, add to this the vast part of the economy supplying and/or supporting the military one way or the other, from washing clothes to direct semi-military support ("contractors").

So you tell me they want stability? I guess you are right - but they want it for their own growth rate and profit margins.

No, that question is unsettled.

If you know better, you might want to give an answer here:

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/14337/q-about-conseq...

the number of true facts

LOL

Anyway - once again you did NOT respond to what OP wrote. What you did has a name: Whataboutism.

Care to say something about what OP actually wrote? Is he right or wrong? Should be easy to prove him wrong since he made very concrete claims.

No, his point is that if you are lying they have an instrument to use against you. Similar to how they got Al Capone, where they didn't have to go through the trouble of having to prove his actual crimes in court.

It isn't about you individually, it's about big numbers, statistics. It's just an additional tool in their arsenal. Similar to why doctors perform standard exams even when you come in and complain about something where that particular exam seems ridiculously wrong. The procedures are not invented new each time for every person, they are based on what works "statistically". On that level they found that in (some low) x percent of cases having such a signature helps, so they include that question. And occasionally they even catch someone gullible to, or who can't manage their emotions, but that's just an additional bonus and not even the main reason for the question(s).

Reason why this is not important is if your only path of attack is through the "who did it" path and you have nothing whatsoever to say about the actual content, maybe you should base your attack on more solid ground. Should be easy: OP gave us facts to verify, not an opinion. If his facts are indeed facts you will need more than merely point to the Koch brothers, regardless of their well-known agenda.

but most people don't seek physical confrontation.

Like that passenger, who did NOTHING. We even have a video (not the first one that was published, a later one) that shows wat he did: NOTHING.

No, the real problem are people like you. You should be removed - from everything. Do you wat to see an asshole? Do you have a mirror?

A lack of subject knowledge when commenting about something does that to you. /s

I refer to what I already wrote. Nothing you say addresses my point. It only works for some.

lots of businesses fit it pretty well.

Keyword: "businesses". If everybody follows that path, who is going to work at those businesses?

You completely failed to grasp my point. You keep looking at a niche and miss the big picture: I only works for a few!

Not to mention what it would mean if everybody could become a millionaire, never even mind how.

That is any topic ever.

Anyone can "contribute" to discussions on anything from the budget of the DoD to health care without having the slightest clue how anything actually works. All you have to do is instead of having to deal with those cumbersome details you just talk about "money" and suddenly everybody is free to join the discussion with great enthusiasm and unhindered by constraints of missing information or subject knowledge.

That's also why a lot of "solutions" to any problem work like this:

  Problem => Money => Solution

  Problem => Magic => Solution

That is the trouble with you guys: You propose ideas that work - but only as long as only very few people do it. Thank you for demonstrating it so clearly - by the way, did you yourself even notice this catch?

It may work for anyone, but not for everyone. I love that in English those words sound so similar. I might be tempted to consider that's part of the problem (as part of the larger "how does language influence thought" topic, where the answer currently seems to be "generally not too much, but it depends"), but in my (non-English speaking) country the same kind of thinking isn't exactly unknown either.

Not to take anything away from your stories because I don't think that group is the problem (as the Economist wrote in an article, it's the 0.01% not the 1% we should worry about, we are much more top-heavy than we think), I would just like to raise this question: Do you know the difference between advice that works for anyone and advice that works for everyone?

Because I have a strong suspicion this is the former. It only works until everybody starts believing and following it. The American dream, for example. Which stopped working, it is said... because it just doesn't work for everyone?

My point is, what if what you say already happened and didn't pan out, what if too many people tried for it to work? So what we have now is not that everybody is lazy, but that too many people realized the system doesn't work for everyone, only for some. Who those "some" are does not matter, it's not a feudal system where titles are inherited so we have more flexibility and who is on top changes. It's just that there can't be too many. Not because it's completely impossible, but just the way everything is set up currently, which seems to promote a flow to the top instead of "trickle down". I certainly don't provide here a complete model to understand what happens, not even close, I just want to give a nudge, a hint of something else there than "laziness". We are way down the path of an endless feedback cycle.