naiveprogrammer

You are nto following the story, cleary. Not only some texts have been verified, they have a former business partner going on record, verifying the messages along the way. What else do you want? People involved in the threads are claiming the messages to be true. What else do you want?

And, by the way, I could care less for the video and photographic content of that laptop, to me that content is irrelevant --actually, I feel sorry for Joe Biden and I can't imagine how hard it must be to have a son who is a drug addict and a man child. But shouldn't that also corroborate the validity of the laptop content? Why isn't the media all over it?

And, please, let's not pretend that several Trump stories came from anonymous sources with no audio or text evidence. And the mainstream media danced all over it. For instance, the (supposedly) anonymous senior administration who was part of the resistance. Not only did the NYT run stories on his unverified accounts (no audio/text/video to back it up), they also wrote a book with his accounts. And we just learned that this senior admin wasn't senior after all. How can you really read thsoe stories and not come way perplexed by the blatant bias? I understand why people hate Trump, but is it worth to abandon journalism standards? Where do we go from here?

You'd think that after 4 years of intense scrutiny by the media, with a 2-year Special Counsel Investigation, people would finally let this go. If you don't see the parallel between this pipe dream and the QAnons of the world, I can't help you.

Instead of blaming fake news and misinformation for the 2016 elections outcome, maybe the Democrats should look themselves in the mirror.

I have yet to see a clear decisive causation link between the Russian interference (e.g. bot farms) and the outcome of the election. Of course there was interference, nobody denies it. But show me that these trolls swayed the election. There is none.

The media has been pedaling the Russian collusion story for 4 years and you don't seem to care because it fits your priors and political agenda. The bigger lesson here is that everybody is ready to accept censorship as long as they are not bearing the (immediate) costs of it.

Excellent post, thank you.

It does seem to me that blaming the whole situation on climate change is an exaggeration. However, it is a politically savvy move from Newsom et al. as west coast states are solid blue. They are pandering to their audience. It also happens on the right with different issues.

I have no doubt that had TikTok been a Russian app and its ultimate stakeholder were the Russian government, some of you here would have no problem with the ban. I am really tired of the double standard.

But most importantly, what the US is applying is plain and old-fashioned Reciprocity trade rules. It is a completely valid and accepted course of action. If China closes its market to US-based social network companies, then the US should do the same. It happens everywhere and you don't see people screaming bloody murder because of it.

In my opinion, it is about time. Not only we are creating a disadvantage to our local companies (FB, Whatsapp, etc), we are inviting a hostile agent to openly collect information on our citizens. I understand that some here want a more stringent policy concerning privacy and data collection. I think it is a fair point, but it is not mutually exclusive here.

Even if we accept the idea that CA was decisive to Trump's victory (I don't think it was, not even close), I think that you are absolutely on point here. I do think democrats were caught by surprise in 2016 and, instead of blaming themselves for their debacle, they sourced it elsewhere.

In other words, you pay what you pay to attend Harvard, to a large extent, because of its network effects. And that is really the reason at the end of the day. This is especially true in areas where network is expected to be a big factor --think Economics, Law, Business.

And that's why you pay that much to go to Harvard, to gain access to their network.

And why is that? I am a certified C noob and this really confuses me. Why `alphabet_pointer = alphabet;` points exactly to the first element in the array? Why not the whole array? Why not the last? Can we have a pointer that accepts a whole array?

Thanks

Seems like cherry-picking to me.

Italy has an older population to start with. I don't think the US will remotely reach the chaos we are seeing in Italy.

When it is all said and done, we will find out that the mortality rate is very close to regular flu (around 0.1%). Italy, China and other countries with high mortality rate are not a great model because they were caught unprepared and their health system cannot sustain a moderate peak in hospitalizations. Also keep in mind that a large segment of the infected people go untested in most places which affects the denominator. I see many epidemiologists estimating that the number of true infected is 5 or even 10 fold of what we are seeing being reported. If that is the case, then we can assume the mortality rate certainly drops to less than 1% and most likely ranges in the 0.5% to 0.1%.

Amen

I don't know whether this is a legit breakthrouhg. But technological progress is often a sigmoid (S-shaped) growth curve, it may take a while to get past certain steps but once you are through, money flows and more people devote time to that technology which accelerates the process. It is not hard to imagine, say, 20 years from now, we have power plants running on fusion given the interest we have in solving the climate crisis.

Sometimes I wonder if in some instances a low approval rating is endogenous to the company's employee makeup. I work in the HE sector and I can tell you that the lowest levels of student satisfaction comes from departments or disciplines comprising of mostly people complaining about society, yadayadyada

"play stupid games win stupid prizes"

Vox's newsroom unionized, even though I would suppose that they are likely treated better than most journalists -- at least to the extent the business' economics allow.

Better treatment also involves better pay. Being nice to your employee is not enough. Vox may treat employees nicely, but you'd be surprised how low they pay to their occasional writers who are scattered in a bunch of niche vehicles.

First of all, Greenwald did not steal anything, and he is being charged because he actively engaged in covering the hackers' tracks. That is criminal in Canada, Brazil or US... I am pretty sure that had Mr Greenwald been in Canada he'd be charged by now. It is precisely why he is in Brazil. Because Brazil is a Banana Republic where the powerful and well connected can get away with most of the things unless the evidence is very clear. Greenwald has a wide net of supporters in Brazil who are very powerful, starting with the Worker's Party, the Communist Party of Brazil and so one. Not to mention his husband who is a congressman himself.

Just because Mr Greenwald is facing death threats as a result of his work doesn't mean he is 100% on his interpretation of the story. Also you forgot to mention that Greenwald's husband is a congressman which means they enjoy some enhanced security. Also you need to mention that the Brazilian's Worker's Party (the largest party in Congress) has Mr Greenwald's back. He is far from being alone in Brazi, there is a broad support from the establishment. It doesn't mean that his worries about his security are overblown, my point is that he enjoys a great deal of support especially from journalists, politicians and the Brazilian last instance's judges.

However, as we now know thanks to Greenwald, this anti-corruption fight was corrupt in itself, and the person overseeing the investigation was cooperating with the prosecutors to strengthen their case.

That is according to Greenwald. Judges and prosecutors talk all the time in private. This is your opinion. Many in Brazil and abroad don't think such practice configures collusion. Especially if you read the transcripts, it is far from being damming to Mr Moro and the prosecutors.

Absolutely. And there is a gap here to be bridged. In the current political discourse, I see a narrative of men and women being put as adversaries, as if they were competing for something whereas in most cases they are complements and their whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And I repeat, males are just as guilty here. Divorce has gone through the roof, single mothers are an ever increasing share of the parental composition. Men are running away from their responsibility which is to raise their children in conjunction with their partner. I hope we turn a corner sometime soon.

There is certainly something to be said about the way stay-at-home mothers are perceived by many in our society. They provide one of the most valuable contributions to society and should be praised. The issue is: many females take this issue at a personal level. Being a stay-at-home mom is a choice and most people don't look down on women who choose a different path. Also, some women can't simply cope with the fact that they have a biological clock and their careers may be on the way to their motherhood (or vice-versa). I wish there were more honest conversations about this.

Males also should equally share the burden here I must say, as more and more of us run away from life responsibilities. The 30 year old basement dweller meme is real.

I appreciate the author's piece but motherhood is not an alternative argument for why women leave STEM, it is THE argument. It is, in all likelihood, the strongest factor to influence women's decisions to leave the field. The evidence is getting overwhelming, just check the most recent publications by Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin (most recent: https://test.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/113672/version/...)

Sexism is real but its importance is far from being large. It is really tiresome to see the news regurgitating the talking point on wage gap without properly giving context.

What is clear to me is that the wage gap as measured by the average earnings by gender (even drilled down by field) is very hard to be fixed given the obvious biological differences between males and females (in which motherhood reigns supreme).

Women also need to be honest about their prospects, it is very hard to juggle a career and motherhood. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So there needs to be an honest confrontation on the trade offs of motherhood and having a career and the cope that comes with it.

The benefit of extra speed in ballot count does not completely offset the risks of electronic voting. Not only the risks of massive tampering in electronic ballots and servers, but also the lack of clarity on how the process works under the hood for the median voter.

There are problems and problems. I think the reader needs to adapt to their reality when reading the blogspot. Sometimes the reader needs to do some work and contextualize a piece of advice. I think the blogpost made total sense to me, in the context of my work. There is a (not-so-fine) line between embarking into a intractable or incredibly risky task and a hard problem that nobody wanted to do solve. Keep in mind that a hard problem is not necessarily what you find hard but what your colleagues find hard, that is the point. Go after something that you know can be done but nobody has ventured into. I enjoy a great amount of freedom at work because I've been tackling these hard issues. You see, when you address an elephant in the room, even after being solved, people will not venture to go there and they are happy to leave you alone since you are working on the elephant in the room.

But we need to strike a balance here. I agree with the person above that putting big numbers as to exaggerate and drive panic is not really a prudent approach. At the end of the day, it hurts more than helps for a very simple reason: people remember. If you sell a doomsday scenario and nothing happens, people will start to dismiss your claims, like the boy who cried wolf. I recall 20 years ago seeing articles claiming that "Snow will be a thing of the past" or "Arctic to be ice-free by 2020". Nothing happened. Now we hear that we are facing mass extinction in a few decades. People get anxious and nervous when they see that, but then when nothing happens they will start to discount heavily your claims.

It is not clear to me that poor countries are to experience human loss due to climate change since there is a trade off in place here. If developed and developing countries curb emissions to near net zero levels the world economy will suffer. For instance, people in developing countries are still dying from malnutrition. Preventing enhanced economic global prosperity may affect human lives more than the counterfactual scenario of current emission levels. I am not saying this is true, but I think this question is valid. Of course, it would be ideal if we could stop CO2 emissions without foregoing economic growth but such scenario is not possible as of today. That's why I think the solution will come via technological advances instead of global cooperation to reduce CO2 emissions. Even though I do live in a developed country, I came from a developing country and many of you with the same background as me knows that climate change is the least of their worries when some don't even know what they are going to eat for dinner. My point is, in the absence of a global governance structure that makes prohibitively costly to implement a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions worldwide, there is no way that people in the developing world will choose less economic development. I know climate change is dear and near to many people's hearts here but as far as the consequences are not dramatic and sudden, people in the developing world will not really care except for the rich and upper middle class in developing countries which includes some of the biggest emitters such as China.

The world is not going to end due to climate change in 2100 or 2200. Humans are capable of adapting to developing climates. The Earth is not going to burn to ashes, the most likely scenario are a few degrees higher which will absolutely have an impact but I don't buy the doomsday scenario. Deaths due to catastrophic events have been going down each decade. Population displacement due to flooding is overstated as we are capable of adapting to incremental flooding due to climate change. My point is, let's take gas now as an improvement and work on solutions over time. We can reasonably expect that by 2100 most cars will be electric or some other clean energy fuel. Climate change will not be solved due to international cooperation, this is an intractable cooperation problem. We are beating climate change with human ingenuity but it takes time...

What you say makes perfect sense but when you transpose to the real world the story changes. See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change, by far the best solution out there to reduce emissions. Maybe gas is the second best solution to reduce emissions while we develop other solutions in the meantime.

State and local business tax incentives

Same. The moment I felt that my brain was melting over NSE and dplyr was the moment I started to phase out most tidyverse stuff from my work. I've switched to data.table and plain R for most of my stuff now.