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That's not what the article says. Patients actually died, which doesn't make sense for hysteria. The study found the patients have existing known conditions, which are being mis-diagnosed by this doctor as a mystery illness. It sounds more like malpractice to me.

I agree. I lived with chronic pain for over a decade due to a specific medical problem that, though I could never get a precise diagnosis, was not caused by stress or my mental state. It was incredibly frustrating to deal with family and others who had read articles like this one and insisted all chronic pain was psychological in origin and needed a mind-body approach. I am happy for the author and am sure this approach works for many, but I'm not sure why they think that all chronic pain is common in cause. There are a host of chronic pain conditions that are physiological in origin and not psychological.

Climate change, science, and the environment are indeed valid reasons (as was plainly stated at the time) for subsidies to electric cars (amongst hundreds of billions of dollars of other environmental subsidies Democrats passed). The CEO spending hundreds of millions of dollars to curry favor with the ruling party, which is almost certainly the reason this specific number was chosen, is not.

Volkswagen was one small part of the Nazi's policy. It ultimately didn't deliver a single car to the users of its government-endorsed savings scheme, but instead was used for military production. You know what other companies have heavily relied on billions of dollars of government subsidies and military contracts? https://archive.is/lVZ3f

The Nazi party was not socialist, it was just in the name. The Nazi party had a leftist socialist wing, which was expunged on the Night of Long Knives. Hitler himself generally stayed above such economic debates, and instead promised a sort of hazy race-based utopia that had elements of capitalism and socialism. Once the Nazis came to power, they did not try to seize private ownership of the means of production, but rather made corrupt deals with corporate powers (ironically not too dissimilar from Musk's current trajectory). When they did enact surface-level socialist programs such as consolidating labor unions into the Deutsches Arbeitsfront (DAF), it was done with incredible corruption that generally ended up suppressing labor and supporting management. As is common with extreme-right parties, Hitler basically used socialist rhetoric for its popular appeal, promising all of its advantages without the drawbacks (and similarly with capitalism). Once in power though, he did not enact socialist policies. I would not trust political entities based on their name, no more than I would trust the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to be democratic.

Musk does not have any incentive to help you and me, he has an incentive to use the government apparatuses to further his businesses. He is a good businessman who has made two very valuable companies; this does not mean he will use the government responsibly, e.g. by ensuring fair competition. As a simple example, after having relied on it for years, he is now trying to eliminate the EV tax credit because it will harm his competitors more than him [1]. This kind of regulatory capture is not good, and we should not cede government power to him or people with conflicts of interest like him.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-elon-musk-donald-trump-ev...

There are countless examples of Musk selectively banning people on Twitter based on political belief, such as this one [1]. And of course, he banned the @elonjet account, even after specifically saying he would not [2]. More specifically to StarLink, he banned Ukrainian forces from using them around Crimea [3].

[1] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/twitter-suspends-journ...

[2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

[3] https://archive.is/jfdy4

A cop is within 8 feet of you during a traffic stop. So if the cop puts you or another passenger under arrest, you have to stop filming. And if you were filming before and caught the cop doing something illegal, they are now incentivized to arrest you to make you stop.

A bystander interfering with police has nothing to do with recording and is already illegal. This is clearly just an attempt to make it more difficult to hold cops accountable.

Celebrities who are douche bags are criticized all the time — I'm not sure what your point is exactly. Musk is not just a "celebrity," he is one of the most powerful men on the planet. Most celebrities don't control 10% of one the most powerful media apparatuses in the country.

Musk is seen by many as a sociopathic narcissist who will do whatever it takes to get what he wants. Doing things like sending private investigators to try and dig up dirt on that rescue diver who criticized him hardly distances him from that image (and doesn't help his claims of being a "free speech absolutist" either). Those traits combined with tremendous power are generally not a good combination.

We don't owe him anything for his business ventures. He isn't running a charity. He isn't doing it for you and me. Electric cars and rockets are very cool, but are not moving humanity into some new dawn. The idea that he is some necessary component of "hard evidence that we can build new things" that deserves special treatment is borne straight out of a personality cult. Pointing this out is a far cry from "claiming his work isn't valuable."

Peacefully protesting (and yes, the vast majority of BLM protests were peaceful [1]) the extrajudicial killing of black men is not remotely on the same level of extreme political activity as the outgoing president orchestrating a coup attempt to try and stay in power.

There is no equivalency between far-right and far-left violence in the US. There is a much, much greater rise in far-right violence [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

Manhattan was not "ransacked" last summer. You clearly don't live in one of these American cities. The overwhelming majority of the protests were peaceful [1].

Your claim that an attempted coup was somehow spurned by protests relating to the extrajudicial killing of black men is a rather bold one to make with absolutely no supplied evidence. I suppose finding cause in the drastic uptick of far-right violence [2] you have conveniently omitted, which would serve as a much better basis for the "broken window theory", is too easy of a conclusion to make. As is finding cause in the president quite literally inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on the basis of false claims of election fraud. No, it's those protesters!

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

Yup I agree, I think there's tremendous opportunity for computer tools to aid chess. Things like Lichess's recent ability to automatically categorize puzzles by the type of tactic was very cool, and only scratching the surface.

Ok, the implication in my comment was that they can't be weakened like humans, not that they cannot be weakened at all. The phenomenon of random mistakes does not need to be programmed in the engine, it is a byproduct of lowering the search depth or eval function.

Your experience with engines then is very different from my own and that of the wider chess community. The general consensus is that playing computers at any strength is both counterproductive and unfulfilling. They do indeed make random blunders if you lower their search depth. The engine will play brilliant moves for any tactic that falls within the search depth, but fail miserably for tactics that fall one ply outside of it. Humans function very differently to computers: they evaluate a fraction of the positions, but use a much more sophisticated evaluation function. There is no way of emulating human weakness with such a vastly different style of computation.

Here is a game I just played that illustrates this phenomenon:

https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black

The engine plays well before making a series of random blunders no human would make. You can try this yourself by playing the different Stockfish levels on lichess.org. You will be unable to find a level that makes for an enjoyable game. There are some new engines that use neural networks to try and play similarly to how humans do [1]. I can't comment on their success, but their lack of wide adoption by the chess community signals to me that it is still incomparable to humans.

[1] https://maiachess.com/

Computers are far stronger than humans and win every game. They cannot be artificially weakened as they do not play like weaker humans, but rather make a mixture of incredibly strong moves and random mistakes. As such, it would be a tournament of trying to lose the best game against a computer, which is not an accurate simulation of what human-human chess is like.

There is no sense in comparing per-capita deaths this early in the pandemic, especially when the spread of the virus in the US trails a few weeks behind that in Europe. Talk to me in a few months. Furthermore, per-capita figures are meaningless when comparing areas of substantially different population size and density (e.g. Austria, Switzerland) to the US. _I_ do not see how a "rational and objective analysis" like yours can ignore these basic mitigating factors when making such comparisons.

How does this at all prove the "cataclysmic forecasts from scientists" — namely, that climate change will destroy the reefs — wrong? The scientist responsible for this study himself says, "We need to stop climate change, because it's not going to be enough," i.e. this discovery doesn't chance the broad forecast at all.

Sure, that's an interesting question, whether or not Twitter can block people commenting on Trump's tweets. If Twitter colluded with him, then I assume it would be considered the same as Trump himself blocking them. But if the White House released press releases exclusively on some right-leaning platform that independently blocked any dissenting views, I wonder what the court would say.

So is it the fact that a member of government clicked the block button the violation?

From the decision: "The First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees...."

I believe the problem is that Trump uses the account for official purposes. I assume that any account that carries out official government business falls under this decision.

If it was a President whom the moderators at Twitter supported and they willingly blocked all of this President's critics on his behalf, would that make it legal?

If it were on his behalf, I assume the court would consider this equivalent to the President himself blocking them. If Twitter themselves blocked people independently and without colluding with the President, I have no idea. I assume private businesses can continue to block/ban whomever they see fit, but if a public official were to only use platforms that automatically blocked dissenting views, I don't know what the court would say. It's an interesting question.