istultus

Ireland is such a useful tax haven that it's within all of our interests to protect it </kidding not kidding>

That assumes that their mission is to stop anything. UNRWA's sole mission (like most large-scale nonprofits - not suggesting they're unique) is to continue to procure money for its 30,000 or so salaried posts.

There's nothing morally wrong with not knowing when you want to take a holiday in advance and acting accordingly to cover your bases. What an interesting sentiment... The only thing wrong with what she did was not to read the fine print and realize that paying for free cancellation meant paying Booking.com to pay on her behalf rather than directly paying the hotel.

True! Thankfully under Socialism there wouldn't be a Grand Prix in the first place, and the Hotel would be government-run and only house Party members during special events anyway.

Bias - an inclination of temperament or outlook [1]

Politically colored = an inclination of outlook

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bias

The important thing is that these things get funded. It doesn't matter what institute funds them. If an institute becomes stultified and corrupt, there's no reason to champion it over creating another.

It really does suck that US companies have belatedly figured out that demand is elastic and jacked up the prices. Where I live that happened long ago.

The thing is that he doesn't present any alternative. I know he's some variant of a communist, so does he suggest government control for everything? As if that solved anything? I guess what you find on empty market shelves is cheaper.

Truly a question - what's your solution? What's a solution? People have been arguing that everything is getting worse since forever. I've yet to see people organize and stop buying Pepsi or Coke. Should the government do it for them? Do you propose AI will solve the Socialist Calculation Problem? You're probably against AI as well...

Well, "win" as a noun is a word from Old English attested before 1150 [1]. And as a word firmly in the language it has its own specific uses in comparison to "victory". It would be silly or pompous to call a win in a sports game a "victory," for example. It would similarly be out of place to call a victory in a battle a win. "Congrats *on the big win" doesn't sound out of place.

[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/win_n1?tab=factsheet#14538168

Also read it this year - very good.

I would use "elucidate" first and foremost, but "decipher" or "unravel" also work.

The only reason this Ancient Greek definition holds is because it is a dead language. Prescriptivism cannot stop natural language change. Any "X should only mean Y" statement is a dead-end conservative approach.

How have they improved quality of life? Asthma?

As usual, "Conjecture Presented as Fact in Headline"

They found a fabric in a royal tomb in Greece that fits the description of Alexander's famous sarapis. What is more likely - that this is Alexander's sarapis itself or that a very rich guy had one made just like it?

What's the logic of the first sentence? I can't parse it - is that it should be illegal for intelligence agents to be heads of state? Or is it that states with powerful armies shouldn't have former intelligence agents as heads of state? Or what?

As for the second question - why is every generation of the left charmed by a different set of psychopathic terrorist groups?

Makes sense. Now that the Graun's chief enemy is Israel and Colonialism, why not combine two favored targets into one hateful guy? I'm also pretty sure he was cis-gendered.

This has to take the cake for "most spurious correlation." The most coherent reading is "places which report more homocide data are correlated with reporting more left-handedness"

Ugh, we're going through the cycle of the author of the book going around spreading his little tidbits in all the main sites/podcasts (I heard him on Econtalk).

For us rest-of-the-worlders - note that Peanut allergy is not an invention - there is a small minority of people with peanut allergies, even after exposure to peanuts as infants. However, there is a larger subset of people who developed peanut allergy in the US through full avoidance of peanuts, so that when later in life they came into contact with them, it started an IgE-mediated cascade (according to the model, on the second exposure to peanuts) that could've been avoided had their body been habituated to peanuts earlier in life.

The real thing to learn here is how suggestions become dogma in human society. "We don't know what's causing allergy, maybe just avoid it?" becomes "We [some formal group of pediatric allergologists] suggest to avoid peanuts" becomes "Our guideline is to avoid peanuts".

The point of Evidence-Based Medicine is exactly to avoid this, but note that this is the standard affairs in anything else in life. Iterative improvement is built on doing something until it stops working/starts harming and then doing something else. It's just magnified where human life is concerned - Military, Aviation, Medicine, etc.

Just like in Aviation - the best solution is process - to admit mistakes and force changes and improvements without knee-jerk opprobrium and litigation (here it's obvious that no medical association should suggest something extreme if there's no evidence for it one way or the other, duh) - but creating sensationalist headlines demonizing a group just makes sure that future mistakes will continue to be covered up.

This is a commonplace corollary to Gell-Man Amnesia/Knoll's Law[1] - in truth every single field/category in the universe has varying degrees of stupidity, it's just that you only reacts emotionally to the stupidity in the fields you have a personal attachment to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

As with any "New York Times Journal of Medicine"-type article, the author of the article didn't understand/chose to inflate the actual research - what they did was create a system that captures the fungus's electrical activity and used those pulses to arbitrarily assign movement rules to the robot. There's no suggesting of the fungus controlling the robot - merely a showcase that we have a system to capture the electrical activity of a mushroom. For all intents and purposes we have a robot with a motor instead of any other indicator - could've been a monitor showing a graph.

I think the book's name confuses true neophytes who've never even heard of vector space and assume that this book will teach them applied linear algebra. I always thought that this book is for people like me who have already played around with matrices and remember most of the theorems (the intuitive ones), but are left with a creeping sensation of "I know the magic works, but ~why~ does it work?". Needless to say this is a go to reference for me whenever I see a need to refresh something of the basics.

Or in short - the Yin and Yang of mathematics - sometimes you need the excellent dry theory and sometimes you need the more concrete but messy application, and in truth you will always vacillate between the two - this is the former.

I can't bring myself to read this monolith because the two premises at the top are wrong: 1. Y2K was a real phenomenon that needed fixing in various aspects, and 2. fraudulence is not a problem of "capitalism" - it's a problem of humanity. Hell, the biggest quote used to explain the Soviet economy was "they pretended to pay us and we pretended to work".

Nice, you've found a pathway to hiring more veterans

Exactly, anecdotes, with a healthy portion of the Availability and Confirmation Heuristics.

We already know that women are more susceptible to auto-immune responses and that pregnancy is one of the reasons for that disparity between the sexes (carrying a foreign invader for 9 months plays with the expression of immunity genes in a manner that occasionally - rarely, at a population level - backfires.) And we know that the risk for an autoimmune "malfunction" rises with age. Thus there will obviously be random clusters of people, with more women who've given birth and and average age that skews older than, say, 30 - to which you unfortunately seem to belong - where there are more autoimmune responses than the average population.

What's funny is that in response to this post there are multiple posts each suggesting their own conspiracy. I wonder if this actually points to something, or it too is a just random noise.

The rest of the world has governments that negotiate directly the Pharma companies and strike up deals that subsidize the first X doses per year per Y number of people. Once the limit is passed it's the same for everyone - pay the price or find an alternative. NB that this doesn't happen only with US companies, e.g. Roche is very profitable selling Million-dollar-per-course cancer treatments. But in general, the fact that Pharma companies can sell at "full price" in the US subsidizes the drugs for the rest of the world.

Like many a disease with an old name, Psoriasis refers to a localized cutaneous autoimmune disease usually treated by dermatologists, and a severe family of Rheumatic (autoimmune) diseases, part of the Spondyloarthropathy family, that happens to have a cutaneous element which is the same (and often is the first symptom). This treats the latter, debilitating and possibly life-threatening variety.

Beyond that logical tantrum easily refuted - I'm 52% on free will, say a tenth of a bip on god and magic:

At least in Judaism there is sizable chunk of believers who believe in God and that everything is God's will and thus there is no free will - Hashgachah Pratit - so at the very least only one direction of your argument could hold, though I don't understand why it's a coherent idea to begin with.

(also, which particular audience are you trying to insult with that categorical statement and why?)

As someone who isn't American but grew up in California in the 90s, I find myself often explaining American public behavior to others who are baffled by it.

As I see it, the US - the first place with a supposed egalitarian bent on the cosmopolitan society - created a system whereby people from all backgrounds and ethnicites could interact in the public sphere without tripping each other's emotional wires - that is the basis for Political Correctness. Keep your baggage at home, and out in the real world and in the market you can interact with everyone as equals (so, Mike Munger's "the answer is trasaction costs!").

The system worked pretty well for a time (fine, it's called the 90s). The problem is that the edifice kept on being built up, as more voices raised more touchy subjects that needed to be sanitized in public, enough that it began to bother people. I think that as alternative means of communication allowed people to more be "themselves" in the digital, if not real, public domain, the discrepancy between public discourse and private thought became more glaring.

Now, for every system, there are those who naturally like to uphold norms, and these are the ones you say are "virtue signalling" - I think they're just norm upholders. But for the rest of us, it takes only one euphemism that hits us the wrong way to get us questioning the whole over-built edifice. The fact that one political side arbitrarily took it up as a cause, of course, made the other side all the more dogmatic in its application.

So it will be eventually torn down and replaced by something identical and the cycle will continue anew. ~fin~

Isn't it time, as the process is becoming normalized (as with the Artemis project) to start using the term "(gravitational) slingshot" in headlines?

Thanks!

(everyone is more visual, though we have less aggregated data on how blind people use their visual cortex)

There's humor that a drug developed to treat diabetes, using a peptide we know physiologically to lower blood sugar, and secondarily found to also help drop weight is now getting headlines showing that it does its stated purpose.*

* Yes, I get that this is supposedly a preventive study - but if your metric for diabetes is blood glucose level, and you take a drug that lowers blood glucose level, it's not surprising that people on it are found to "fail" to reach the given threshold for diabetes on average