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robertpateii

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contact info, blog, and projects: http://www.robertpate.net/

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Yeah, intentionally misleading consumers should always be at least somewhat illegal. Sure caveat emptor, but consumers having accurate information is implied and a cornerstone of a competitive market.

Read the article. It doesn’t even ask if dextromethorphan and phenylephrine should be illegal. It asks if intentionally misleading consumers about their efficacy should be.

Being physically fit past your 30s is a series of building habits and making hard choices that obviously is a challenge of its own that many in sedentary jobs have skipped or fallen away from. OP may be fit, but yeah for average office worker (especially in locations that are car-bound on long commutes) I’d bet there is indeed more going on than just autism.

Having to select self care and breakfast every morning (and meds on some routes) is a good reminder for me of the importance of those things in the long run of a whole day. I don’t think I’m any farther on the spectrum than the average software developer, but it’s still a daily decision to be made. (Of course for those people with different breakfast patterns - you still have a best approach for yourself that you must decide to follow every morning.)

Similarly for the masking meter, I don’t know what it feels like exactly to have mask. However isn’t it hard, in varying degrees, to constantly determine and go through with the right forward-looking choice in real life? My guess is what’s a challenge for some is also a heavy toll on others.

Habits help with much of the daily decisions, but are of course their own challenge to implement and maintain.

Good Writing 1 year ago

Fiction still has ideas to get across and internal consistencies it needs to maintain to be enjoyable and get those ideas across.

When characters do things that beggars belief built upon their previous actions, it can ruin the whole story.

Even poetry has some truth and concept inside the poet to which it’s bound.

Good Writing 1 year ago

Imo, that quote is clearly a train metaphor. But to your point, I do vaguely recall being unclear plenty when I read Moby Dick decades ago.

to see what an individual is working on, what they’ll be working on next, *and what they done recently.*

This last bit is useful, but tricky to get reports on in a single assignee system. Say it’s the end of the week and I want to show off myself or my team. The system would need to track assignee at resolution or at re-assignment, or let me filter all of one user’s activities down.

Does any single-assignee system handle this well? I’ve always had to manually take note of bug IDs mentioned in standups to achieve a good list of who did what when only using one assignee at a time.

Charity events have always had a suggested donation amount for this reason. If a project doesn’t suggest a donation amount then they intentionally or unintentionally ignoring conventional wisdom.

Disturbing a donation pool is interesting but not far off patreon.

Ohhh by “it” you mean lifespan not quality of life or standard of living which are the relevant measurements of what we should be gaining from productivity. I didn’t realize you were going to nit pick a couple of very specific examples among many.

p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.

Vain and selfish people probably aren’t going to sit around and live on the basic level. It’s more about providing for the ignored, the sick, and enabling people to take risks in the market without putting their family’s lives at stake.

I don’t understand how UBI forces you to stop working at your job. Wouldn’t you potentially be paid even more if everyone who does that job but hates it stops? And the compensation to do it increases to compensate?

Those examples save us minutes but don’t make humans more free or happier or safer. Better examples would be increased lifespans and lower infant mortality. Stuff that ties into the standard of living definition. Which is the point: our standard of living has not increased at the same rate as productivity.

It's not nonsensical, but it does imply some assumptions about a free market and the social contract.

Governments exist to benefit their citzens. A free market is a great benefit thanks to competition forcing out businesses that don't prioritize their consumers.

This assumes perfect competition though and it assumes a lot of things that are not realistic such as there being no barriers to entering a market. Clearly there are massive barriers to becoming a new ISPs so some non-zero amount of regulation is reasonable.

tl;dr: It's reasonable for a captialist government to intervene when the free market fails to incentivize businesses to benefit citizens.

Do you need a VPN? 9 years ago

VPNs protect you from snooping by 3rd parties on the way to Bob's site, such as your ISP, anyone on your network, or anyone on any of the intervening nodes between you and Bob's.

If you don't want Bob to identify you then yeah you need more than just VPN such as ad blockers, disabling cookies, and more.

It's good they're talking about this. But I'm surprised there's no mention of the "more speech" quote, how old this issue is, and how clearly the solution has been declared by the supreme court over the years (discussion not silence).

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Brandeis, 1927.

I'd never read the whole opinion until just now. It's great and the paragraph that quote comes from is stirring. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357#pg_377

edit\addendum: ACLU has a FAQ on this issue that directly addresses the universities: https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus

I didn't know about this, but it's all I wanted google apps for anyway.

I can attest it takes about 5 minutes to setup if you already have web space somewhere and know how to access its email server details.

I feel like most of the comments are reading the title and not the article.

The author is actually suggesting that Thiel and Kasparov are probably wrong, and the current economic situation could be explained by simpler means (results of a financial meltdown as opposed to running out of things to invent).

I'm inclined to put more faith in the economist pushing the simple and previously observed cause than the big names pushing a doomsday scenario.

9to5 14 years ago

You've already noted this in your previous comment, and now you've included a word that is typically used in anger.

I'm guilty as the next internet-person of over-reacting. I can see no reason to be upset about someone else doing the same, whether it's Marco, you, or any other reasonable stranger.