devinhelton

The test-kit that the CDC sent to local labs had a faulty reagent, so all test requests have to be sent back to the CDC.[0]

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

While publishing the negotiated prices for each procedure code would be interesting, I don't see how it would change much since it wouldn't necessarily be the price they would actually charge me, and it wouldn't help me know beforehand what sort of add-on procedure codes/bills were going to be part of my care.

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.

Every book taking a stance on a controversial subject is going to have those kinds of criticisms from the opposite side. It doesn't make those criticisms true.

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.

However tasty meat may be, it’s ethically and environmentally bad.

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.

It makes perfect sense: meat is expensive and difficult to work with, so low-cost chains like these have been serving really disgustingly low-quality meat for quite some time now; in some cases it could barely even be called meat.

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.

On their ingredients page ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html ) it says that the patty consists of:

"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.

That is why McDonalds undergoes the painstaking process of sanitizing their meat with an ammonia wash (prompted by the 90's nationwide beef e-coli outbreaks that resulted in serious litigation against popular burger joints), then adding in artificial flavorings back in to make it taste like a burger again (furthermore this is how McDonalds achieves that "miraculous" feat often described here when this topic comes up of having their burgers taste the same and have the same consistent product everywhere for over 20 years).

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. "

Super-star athletes aren't really good examples to learn from. They often have to do unhealthy and extreme things to their body in order to achieve absolute peak performance at one specific task. NFL linemen and sumo wrestlers are unhealthily overweight. Boxers and wrestlers have unhealthy levels of body fat and hydration in order to squeeze into the lowest possible weight class. And long distance runners avoid developing any upper body muscle, because every pound of additional weight costs seconds on their time. That's not something a normal person should do.

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.

and a low BMI (body-mass index) indeed (I'm around 18)

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.

So does the New York Times owe an apology and a correction for this article? "Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”" https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.... And this one? "Too much time spent in a chair could shorten our lives, even if we exercise" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/well/move/get-up-stand-up...

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.

Anything that makes the user invest a bit in the reputation of their account before they are allowed to message strangers would do the trick. Charge $10 for signing up. Limit @-mentions until you have built up a small following and activity track record. Require an application to join the forum. Etc, etc.

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.

Existing laws we already operate under have much more severe maximum penalties than people realize, and judges are (relatively) reasonable at applying them correctly.

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.

It seems what happened is that all the promising/useful areas of inquiry from ancient philosophy have since become their own fields. "Natural philosophy" became physics/biology/chemistry and so forth. Thus university philosophy departments were basically left with the dregs -- lots of debates over non-falsifiable claims, lots of debates caused by poor definitions of words. Ethics is the only subfield of modern philosophy I can think of that seems useful and interesting to me. Maybe political philosophy too, but that has mainly moved to the political science department.

"The dollar represents a claim against the government."

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.

No, that is not how banks work. You are not holding actual legal tender, your bank account is a credit with that specific bank that the bank promises to pay back to you with legal tender on demand. But the bank has lent out that money and might not be able to actually pay you back (or might need to be bailed out by the FDIC to pay you back if your account is under $250k).

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.

Similar thing happened with the original US dollar. After the Revolutionary War, everyone thought that the paper currency issued by the Continental Congress was going to be worthless, so veterans sold their paper dollars for a fraction of face value. Speculators bought them up, and then got a windfall when the new Constitution was passed and the currency actually became valuable.

I think it could make sense for the US government to provide a way to hold existing dollars in digital form, directly with the government. So I could go to a bank (or specially designated federal institution), deposit cash, and have that cash turned into a balance of 100% reserve digital cash held on the government's books. I could then make cost-free, instant transfers to other people or other accounts. The government could support people outside the US holding accounts. It could have API's that allow people to build transaction systems on top of the digital currency system.

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.

then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.

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.

but the quality of their journalism is generally superb.

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.

"We work in partnership with governments who release people from jail on condition that they work with Promise as an alternative to being in custody. We also provide support to people under community supervision. We use an intake assessment to create an individualized plan that is based on the risks and needs of each participant. "

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've been maintaining a compilation of articles arguing both sides of this issue -- https://countersearch.net/counter-articles#header-women-in-t... (Articles saying tech has a sexism problem are on the left, articles denying a problem of sexism are on the right). I'm always interested in finding high quality articles for the compilation. But I've flagged this one because is it doesn't anything new and I'm sick of having the same talking points posted to HN over-and-over again.

"We really just need better public education"

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

What about someone who commits auto theft? Seems like isolation is actually overkill and more inhumane than other forms of punishment. 24/7 GPS monitoring should suffice to make sure he doesn't steal again. But you still need punishment, else the calculus for the would be criminal is heads I get a car, tails, I get caught, but nothing bad happens to me.

It's cheap to point out the problems of a system with making a case for something that might work better. Answer my question: What should be done about the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her?

I am all for teaching empathy. I am all for teaching people to behave well because it is the right thing to do (not because of fear of punishment).

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.

But throughout the whole range of history, not only is there no evidence of the existence of a metallic standard of value to which the commercial monetary denomination, the “money of account” as it is usually called, corresponds, but there is overwhelming evidence that there never was, a monetary unit which depended on the value of coin or on a weight of metal; that there never was, until quite modern days, any fixed relationship between the monetary unit and any metal; that, in fact, there never was such a thing as a metallic standard of value.

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.

Facebook uses all this data to show you ads for things you might want to buy. Wouldn't you rather see that than ads for things you don't want to buy?

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.

"It's important I think to understand that the NLRB isn't saying that it's unlawful to write the Damore memo."

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."

I think the reason is that we associate driving with negative externalities (pollution, renewable resource usage, etc.) and so if the response to congestion pricing is that people drive less and seek alternative means (using public transportation, telecommuting, etc) then that is an additional win.

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.

Why hasn't the past half century been filled with at least trying new things? What happened to laboratories of democracy? Although I admit I have a slight repulsion to the thought of a few billionaires being able to wield almost complete autonomy...

You've just answered your own question. In America, we believe it is illegitimate for any city or state government to not be a democracy. And democracy in practice means rule by a web of committees and bureaucracies. (Electing a strongman to cut through all of this is considered anti-democratic.)

But building an innovative product, whether that be an iphone or a new kind of city, requires directly responsible individuals ( https://medium.com/@mmamet/directly-responsible-individuals-... ). It cannot be design by committee. It requires having a singular will with the power to overrule the squabbling factions that just want to protect their own interests.

If you want innovation in the way cities are built and managed, you need cities to be able to have a Steve Jobs/Bill Gates-like CEO with powers far beyond that of any mayor, beyond the powers of any city government. But our current ideology of democracy does not allow for that.