challenger22

This is mostly as a reply to Eliezer Yudkowsky-

I've been in the rationalist community for quite a while, this is the first time I've noticed you here on HN. It is really funny to observe how much people want to argue against you when you condense your point down into a terse statement. Looking through your past comments, it is a very common pattern of behavior.

syn0byte- the man you are replying to is fairly well-connected. I would take the words he said as a credible anecdote- he hangs out with plutocrats enough to know what he said.

I think that even long-term the approach as described in TFA will always require many hours of work for an hour of time saved. The saner way to do it is probably have direct personal assistance for the blind. Phone call systems for the deaf and hard of hearing have been in place for decades, and many of these systems rely on direct personal assistance.

The expected steady-state outcome of this situation is that all website-owning educational companies will be targeted for lawsuits, many of which are valid, and many of which are not. The net effect of these lawsuits will primarily be a massive loss of productivity. It is very technically challenging and labor intensive to make websites accessible to the blind or otherly disabled, and doing so is to the benefit of a very small population, who will continue to primarily use other communication platforms anyway. Net effect: For every hour of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent by others. A saner society would choose a different path.

I wish I could see actual statistics on this, I admit this is wild speculation on my part.

I see a screaming face in the article's top picture. A gaping maw of horror!

You state that there is nothing cultural about birth rates and then list several cultural factors influencing birth rates. And then you state that there is nothing we can reasonably do to increase birth rates, even though most of the factors you mentioned are not set in stone.

I'm not even sure what you are trying to say.

no Excel as an alternative to google sheets? aww.

Congratulations, you have disproven statistical evidence by providing an anecdote.

I would argue that the primary mechanism is cultural changes effecting the fertility rate. Japan suffers a declining population not because of its technology, but because of its culture. Population growth rate peaked in 1968. Up until 1968, lots of evidence social scientists had to work with indicated that technological and social advancement increased the fertility rate (notwithstanding life expectancy changes and rich vs poor countries). Just because cultural changes over the past 51 years have been toward lower birth rates, does not mean that this will continue.

You cannot predict the direction that culture will change. Any predictions I make about this are extremely speculative, but it is easily imaginable that 20 years from now the zeitgeist reacts against the corpus of current culture to be more family-oriented. Think about how much you hear people complain against "the machine." Whether it's on r/latestagecapitalism, or r/the_donald, everyone hates the piss out of broad society, and may find solace in tight-knit families.

More like:

The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.

You didn't make an effort to charitably interpret my question. My question is essentially about whether transient response to changes in albedo occur primarily over the course of days or primarily over the course of years.

Albedo is important, being snide is not.

Interesting, thanks. The mechanisms that cause such a delayed temperature response are still opaque though, figure I gotta read more in-depth technical stuff to really understand.

Because China is emotionally distant enough from most HN commenters that it does not trigger a flame war.

Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting

Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.

I hate it when I find traces of environmental group in my cereal.

The act of decomposing a piece based on the values of the artist and the values of other viewpoints ultimately leads to a spooky place where truth is defined by narrative. This is the domain of postmodernism.

I reconcile the narratives by: 1. Observing which set of values leads to the most effective goal-oriented behavior by individuals 2. Consider the most effective values to be true, in that they are the values most worth believing in because they actually stand the test of time and get results.

I would think that it can still short out and overheat, but the material the battery is made of does not combust or have any exothermic chemical reaction. The energetic failure mode would be- "sparks and gets really really hot."

Look up the 4% rule and firecalc.com to learn how this 100x multiple is a lot less, more like 25x realistically.

A lot of people are irrationally intolerant of risk. Try not to let fear dominate your intuition about investing.

I imagine there's boiler room full of guys somewhere tagging videos as "Borderline content", creating data which then feeds into a machine learning algorithm which decides which videos get promoted. All videos are metricized by the similarity to borderline content, and are increasingly likely to be promoted in proportion to increasing graph distance from the borderline content. Youtube management gets nice plausible deniability that they don't actively surpress political adversaries, because the whole process is stochastic, and who knows how machine learning works anyway?

I wish the people downvoting this guy would actually research this claim. Seems reasonable to me. Seeing for a scatterplot of consumer good MSRP's vs. energy of production would be enlightening.

pull yerself together, man! :)

If you have issues with fine cuts (like fishing line or tissue paper) the scissors on a victorinox swiss army knife work very well. Get a 91mm size knife for scissors that aren't laughably tiny, but only smallish.

On the opposite side, tough items, like leather or pennies (!) can be cut with EMT shears.

Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.

The real problem isn't that we — as a culture — don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality. The problem is rather that theirs is literally the only biological reality we ever bother to consider.

It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm

The article addresses a couple real concerns. But the quoted bits make me think that the author has constructed a viewpoint about society that is intentionally unrealistic and hystrionic. When you do that, you get to beat your war drums, but you lose credit to folks that aren't on the same rhythm.

I follow your example. Thanks for the wisdom.

Failing to declaw an outdoor cat lets the cat kill more birds; cats are an invasive species that kill billions of birds per year.

The true cost of plastic is cheaper by far than aluminum or other alternatives. Injection molding and other plastic technologies are miraculously productive and energy efficient compared to many other forms of production.

The U.S. produces 12,000,000 barrels of oil per day. 4,380,000 barrels per year. According to https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/14/u-s-tax-code-4-6-billio..., we also subsidise this production by $4B per year, or about a dollar a barrel.

If you are saying that a $1 per barrel subsidy for oil causes the cost of plastic widgets to shrink appreciably, I think you are very wrong.

If you are saying that the total cost of the Iraq war should be rolled into the cost of plastic widgets, I think you are very wrong.

Another question- How much more do you enjoy your self-made career over your previous engineering career?

These questions are completely tangential, and may be a bit too personal, but I can't help but be curious...

1. After you moved out to the country, and discovered you did not want to handle the lifestyle of maintaining all that land (esp. w/ tendonitis + family health issues), did you take a financial loss selling the land? I could see that experience being frustrating.

2. Would you be financially independent regardless of your youtube income and other income (selling plans) from your website?

Think of it this way: A cylindrical fuselage provides no lift (except for the lift from its angle of attack flying obliquely through the air), only drag. If you can design the aircraft in such a way that all exterior surfaces contribute to lift, that would be ideal.

The "---" portion of your idea provides no lift, only drag.

It has been known for a long time that flying wing designs are inherently more fuel efficient than typical passenger airline fuselage designs.

I am inferring it from the shape of the aircraft.