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kweinber

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Heart disease is grossly overrepresented because the default cause of death is “cardiac arrest”. This is because that the definition of death is heart stoppage in most states. So if a doc doesn’t know the actual cause, that’s what they write down.

I’m not defending anything about a lab leak. I’m addressing the previous poster’s question about why there were attacks on Asian Americans and not Russian ones.

The lab leak theory and weaponization theories were never squelched. The right wing in this country fantasizes that their viewpoints are marginalized while having their most extreme viewpoints broadcast on the top watched news programs in history. The idea that the lab theories were squelched was floated by those very same programs as part of their promotional formula.

At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique. He admired Vladimir Putin and defended Russian actions, so the Russian people weren’t a subject of his attacks.

I find it interesting that some people feel that moving away from cities and towards a more natural lifestyle means moving to a farm or ranch.

As Steven Pinker notes in his brilliant “Enlightenment Now”, there is nothing natural about a farm. It is basically a factory that subjugates the local ecology to produce monoculture crops so delicate that you have to domesticate humans to take care of them. If you want to live in nature and get away from command and control culture, you may want to skip the farm or livestock ranch and experience nature more directly as forests, meadows etc.

This is an economics problem and this teacher should work with their Econ department to change the rules for course auditing and increase reputational costs to disincentive this behavior. A few options: 1) Make auditing those classes more expensive by limiting the total number of courses a student can audit, or capping the number of students that can audit those courses. 2) Make auditing a remote-only class option. 3) Give lectures on how to spot this behavior which will make the perpetrators obvious and undesirable. 4)Have a no-dating policy between students within the same class under penalty of failure. 5) Couple course participation with a mandatory internship at a STEM company (something a serious student would want but a time-suck for a fake student).

The economics department might enjoy testing these policy changes and could get some papers out of them.

(I wish I could have posted on the original site but I need some sort of karma to do that)

Sad loss. One might wonder how much faster technology’s state of the art would have progressed if we had more people like Fred Brooks working in the field.

Just don’t 4 years ago

This sounds really patronizing. I would be careful with that phrasing. People who don’t want their problem solved often know the solutions and don’t like the tradeoffs or change they entail. It is often not a knowledge problem.

This comes up every few years and it is important to note that the opposite is true. Most unhappy families have drug abuse or interpersonal abuse at play. Most happy families are happy and fulfilled for a variety of interesting reasons.

You might be a giver looking for another giver to build something bigger together. It isn’t correct that givers only want takers. Think of it like cofounders.

Having the same job title and having the same job performance are two very different things. If one person is grossly outperforming another do you have to write them a new job title to compensate them for it?

I’m not a proponent for endless growth, but the metaphor is fraught. An economy is not a single animal, it is a collective…. And collectives/herds/packs in nature grow to the limits of their resources (or create more collectives), just like human economies do. Often to the point of resource exhaustion and colony collapse.

I hope there is a better way to maintain an economy, but nature isn’t a great inspiration.

For those claiming this should be handled in courts: 1) you know it won’t be… especially internationally at the expense of the accuser that has to go through an extradition process. 2) it is still valuable to warn others that a predator is on the loose. 3) it’s already been publicly corroborated by someone else who had a similar experience and you can expect others to follow.