superqd

The most fundamental problem in the U.S. is this: Infinite Growth Capitalism

The VAST majority of what is wrong with our society (political and obviously economic) can be traced to this. It's the expectation that every economic endeavor must show a return on investment - forever. That every entity must strive to optimize the bottom line every day of its existence. Optimizing for growth above all else crushes and consumes everything.

Increasing local manufacturing will only create more opportunities for people to be indentured to a company that literally hates their existence.

A company is forced to build here in the U.S. and people are supposed to rejoice they now have another option for their lives to simply be tolerated and disposable?

It is so deeply painful to witness in my lifetime how our nation's law makers have openly become so profoundly morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Nitpick: lots of text descriptions of visual patterns - this article could use at least 5 visual aid images.

This x 1000

That is the main reason I go to the dentist is to prevent gum issues, which I have had once or twice.

Maybe. I grew up in a very rural area. Others I'm related to have plenty of cavities, and others my age do too...

So... is the existence, or non-existence, of a certain bacteria why some people never get cavities? I'm sure there can be multiple factors, but I'm 51 and never had a cavity, but don't really know the specifics of what might be different about the environment of my mouth that seems to discourage, or not encourage, the formation of cavities.

And yet it garnered millions of users within days. It has inspired people who don't do computers to feel like they can actually get amazing things done with computers. The pace of creative use cases discovered by non-tech types, with such a lazy interface, is nearly impossible to keep up with.

It has democratized what is possible with technology, when that technology was programmable with natural language, i.e., by just asking questions, or asking it to do things, in every day language. It meant people who didn't know how to build software could get software to do their bidding regardless.

This likely depends on the degree and the purpose for which you tried to obtain it.

Some online Masters degree programs are just scams preying on people's desire to improve their careers. They are successful because so many employer's won't pay or promote to certain positions without advanced degrees. So there is a real demand for degrees like MBAs.

For some degrees, the real value is the additional education you receive because of the increased complexity of the subject. Not everyone goes after these degrees for the same reason. For me, I went to grad school in physics not because I thought it would help my career, but because I wanted to learn more physics. I don't think this is the typical reason for which advanced degrees are sought anymore, but at least in some cases, like mine, master's degrees aren't scams, but a necessary part of deeper education into a specific area.

In this case, a "well established method" simply means common-place methodology, not necessarily a robust scientific protocol.

The problem is the humans. We are not reliable witnesses, even of our own pasts, and unless we are following very strict diets, most of us essentially follow a mostly random walk with our food intake across a narrow range of food groups (even caloric intake can be wildly inconsistent over time). I've met enough people who completely underestimate their consumption of desserts, e.g., that they mentally reduce the occurrence of such events in their personal historical narratives. That alone could put many from both low-carb vegans and low-carb meat eaters into the high-carb category.

Which is the point, the worst failure of this methodology is that there is no evidence that human memory, regarding food consumption, provides an accurate measure over long periods of time. If you cannot establish the trustworthiness of the most basic tool of your methodology, then almost by definition it's meaningless. The error in self reporting could be high enough such that the true classification of 80% of the low carb group is actually high carb. Or the vegan group could be nearly half high-carb, etc.

Without a thorough vetting of the accuracy of the instrumentation used in the research (FFQ in this case), we cannot know the margins of error. But we have apriori reasons for believing the accuracy to be significantly high. Adding more people to the group doesn't increase the accuracy in this case, it only increases the volume of the noise. Is the True Low Carb ratio of each group 10% or 90%? Who knows.

If we can't validate the accuracy of the tools, it makes the results essentially a random choice between the possible conclusions. It means they haven't disproven the null hypothesis.

Which is why I favor some form of sequestration of smaller populations of similar genetic makeup (multiple groups for each type of diet), etc. But that is mostly impractical.

Oh, yeah, the biochemistry of individuals is what makes so especially challenging, but not insurmountable. Maybe we are in a simulation to find out whether eating fish is good for you...

I just don't know how ethical it would be to force a particular diet that might affect someone's life expectancy without their consent. I mean, I suppose you could get volunteers...

I just think there is far too much noise in this sort of study to draw any sort of conclusion. An effect has to be very strong to manifest in such noise. Yeah, if the difference in life expectancy was 3 decades, say, then perhaps it would show in such noise.

Every time I've considered how to really do nutrition research, it essentially amounts to a prison, even if voluntary. You would need to be able to lock different populations away from any source of food than what you provide, and control their daily activities, etc, for at least 2 years, though you could likely get some results after only 6 months.

Yeah, it bugs me deeply that this passes as science (and other such "research"). I realize it's difficult to conduct meaningful science in this area, given how different the biochemistry of every person is, but it's something I believe we can do. Given how important our health is, it's something I feel we really need to do.

That particular behavioral change likely wouldn't be bad itself, but that was more a rant on these sorts of studies overall. Poor research has real world consequences in this case (nutrition research), and we really need sound insight into what diet works best for the individual.

Yeah, the ethics would be tough, but essentially to really do nutrition research, you MUST control the food intake. Control for age, weight, calories and activity, and vary only the dietary makeup to varying degrees, etc.

So I studied as a scientist (physicist) and have a high bar for what constitutes a meaningful scientific study and scientific result. A food frequency questionnaire, of the sort this study's results are based on, means very little scientifically. No meaningful result can be drawn, and I consider it borderline immoral, given the type of affect this could have on people's behaviors, to assert a conclusion based on such poorly conducted research.

Asking people to quantify their eating habits over the previous several years and expect to have meaningful quantitative results is impossible. I can barely quantify my eating habits over the last few months. There are just far too many variables that cannot be controlled for in such research as to render any conclusion impossible.

We need meaningful nutritional research, desperately, and this just isn't it. It angers me deeply that this passes as science that will get reported on, used as "proof" in justifying recommendations, etc.

I was contacted by their recruiters recently and started getting warmed up on their interviewing, etc. However, this was back in December when they put out ads against Apple's choice to allow users to opt out of tracking. It kind of made it difficult to want to follow through on the interview process after that... so I didn't.

That doesn't rebut my assertion or complaint at all, since you are referring to a specific type of genetic disorder.

The research in general on nutrition and hearth health is still mostly correlation. Definitely someone with a specific disorder could have a more obvious causal link with cholesterol and cardiac events, but I've read a bunch of different papers, many from respected institutions, and the conclusions usually are, IMHO (I studied physics), garbage.

So much nutrition research is all correlation and no causation. Statements like this, which over-infer, kill me:

"There is little doubt that people with high cholesterol have an increased risk of disease."

It's just as valid to say that people with heart disease are more likely to have high cholesterol. When all you have is correlation, there is a heart disease group, and a high cholesterol group, and all you shown with correlation is that there is a third overlapping group of people with both. With only correlation, you don't know how/why, or even if, members of one group transform into the other. Which is partly the underpinning of the article.

It's possible that high cholesterol is a result of underlying heart disease (which the article says is possible), rather than a cause. But what shocks me is that people, even researchers, seem surprised to realize such possibilities.

Apologies, shorting-bans isn't necessarily a long-term view rule, just an example of something they could do around constraints on trading, not necessarily something they should do, just I expected some kind of trading rules to fix the real problem, which in my opinion is investor pressure, not management short-sightedness.

The rules I suggested aren't necessarily good rules, just random examples. That is, to me the most powerful driver for short term thinking isn't managerial in nature, it's investor in nature. That is, it's the short term fluctuations in market value as investor reactions to events or goals that have nothing to do with the company's bottom line or long term goals, etc. But if essentially random forces are affecting the value of your company, there will exist pressure on management to respond to that pressure. So to me the real fix is some set of rules constraining investor behavior with regards to how the stock is traded, not some nebulous honor-code among CEOs. I am not sure what the rules should be, I just picked random rules out of my butt. But I think there should be some trading constraints: if you truly want to incentivize long term vision, you have to remove the short term pressures.

Like your suggestion for a trading window every 5 years. I have no idea how well that would work, but it seems reasonable, and is the sort of thing I expected for the site, but they seem not to have anything like that in mind. Which to me means that have entirely missed the mark.

Apologies, shorting-bans isn't necessarily a long-term view rule, just an example of something they could do around constraints on trading, not necessarily something they should do, just I expected some kind of trading rules to fix the real problem, which in my opinion is investor pressure, not management short-sightedness.

Hmmm, a bit disappointed after reading their blog and site. I expected that they'd integrated some clever rules around stock trading itself in order to force, or encourage, long term thinking. I expected something along the lines of, "no shorting allowed", "stocks must be held a minimum of 6 months", etc. There was nothing like that, all they have is the rule, "come on guys, think long term".

I fail to see how this will have any meaningful effect on "long term vision", if they still allow your stock price to be dumped at the first sign of trouble, or allow people to bet against your company when some irrelevant bad news hits, or no one else sees value when you decide to deepen your spend on R&D for some long term plan. If people freak out, or think they can profit off of your lack of current obvious value, the you are still going to have short term fluctuations that you will feel pressured to address.

The problem with short term thinking isn't from companies or company leadership, they are reacting to the natural short term fluctuations in their value because of the short term thinking of investors. Shareholders are not gonna understand your vision every time you decide to engage in a long term strategic shift in priorities, so they will react when they find out, and that reaction can swiftly damage a company's value. If shareholders can still trade over short-terms, then you will still have large scale short-term fluctuations that CEOs will be forced to address, as more and more potential buyers will be influenced by the low price of a stock caused by other skittish short-term thinking investors.

The problem is with investors in stocks, not with the companies unwillingness to think long term. To make such an exchange work, you have to have clever trading rules in place to force longer term thinking.

No, not just for academia. Apparently, Amazon uses it to check their designs for correctness.

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/formal-methods-amazon....

You were not the only one

Why in the name of Satan is something like this written on Twitter? I stopped after the first 10. Twitter is not a platform for long form articles, or even relatively short form, honestly. I cannot understand why people write things like this on a platform not designed for it. I mean, when they're writing, I bet they think things like, "man, I wish there was a better way to write all my words at once and publish it for everyone"

No, no, it said they have bottles and bags for such needs. So completely covered.

I really laughed at this comment.

A large part of why things go to hell in hand basket is because so many people believe that things are going to hell in a hand basket.