triceratops

I have used it successfully myself

To de-worm yourself? Awesome, always good to be worm free.

I got a lot of hostile and ridicule and mockery

I don't condone hostility. But if you were a friend of mine and you claimed you cured Covid using ivermectin I would definitely mock you. Sorry bro.

what was an agenda of prejudice [against ivermectin for Covid]

Why do you think it was prejudice and not, y'know, post-judice? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-y...

What's a simpler explanation?

"Ivermectin is really effective against Covid but the drug companies just want to make money so they're suppressing the truth"

OR

"Ivermectin is really effective against worms. Being worm-free is helpful in fighting Covid. If you don't already have worms it won't help you with Covid"

Did you have an open mind to both these explanations? Do they both seem plausible to you?

If you reject explanation 2 outright, maybe you're the one who's close-minded and hostile to new ideas?

If you agree both are plausible explanations, what was your framework to decide which one was true?

It's funny they had to specify "human workers". Who else would strike?

You either care and aggressively cut and pressure the worst emitting countries in whatever way possible

Has the US done either of those things? Now that would've been a worthy use of tariffs.

Nope, because they are irrelevant in the scheme of sources of CO2. Tons emitted is all that matters.

So if China split up into 200 countries, they are irrelevant? The US and Europe are ahead in cumulative emissions even today. If "tons emitted is all that matters" then that's who is the most responsible. All the carbon is still in the atmosphere.

If you only build renewable to deal with a shortage of fossil fuels, then you’re not addressing global warming.

Why the heck not? Whatever happened to "tons emitted is all that matters"? Who cares why you build renewables as long as you build them?

You’re just doing the very normal economic incentive thing.

The US reduces emissions because natural gas is cheaper - "The West took steps to fight climate change". China goes solar because it's cheaper - "Well they're just looking out for #1, they don't really care about the environment".

Bit of a double standard there, no?

All of the solar tech that China is deploying today is paid for by the hundreds of failed startups pushing the technology forward in the 2000-2012 era.

Really they produced panels that cheap in 2012? I didn't see them. And China has produced zero innovations in solar tech or battery tech?

Australia gets a middle finger as well for because they have a shitload of coal

You mean the highest per-capita deployer of solar energy today? In your worldview it seems countries are only allowed economic development on your terms that you've set because they make you look better than everyone else.

If more emissions come from manufacture and transport than are saved by the panel+storage, it would have been better for the recipient to burn fossil fuels.

Fortunately fictional hypotheticals don't happen, so it's all good. You speak as though producing and transporting fossil fuels is emissions-free.

China is also terrible. The difference is that China has a track record of destruction over the last 25 years

And "The West" has a much longer track record than that. Again we see your bias. No one is without blame but you seem eager to assign disproportionate blame to one country because of this bias.

while climatologists screamed from the rooftops

And US voters gleefully voted in multiple climate change denying administrations.

That’s the problem with climate change, it doesn’t matter if you increase solar production until you actually get rid of the coal burning.

The difference is that China is realistically on a path to end coal burning. The US is not currently on track to stop burning natural gas and gasoline, given its refusal to consider, indeed its active sabotage of, alternatives.

I’m shitting on people who are praising China for being the #1 emitter

Largest country in the world is the largest emitter. Quelle surprise. Does Vatican City get a prize for being the smallest emitter?

long after the west realized how bad climate change was and was trying to correct them.

The West led by the US whose adminstration currently denies the existence of climate change? Whose emissions drop was due to the fracking boom and natural gas becoming cheaper than coal? Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back. If fracking hadn't been invented how much coal would the US be burning today?

China burns coal because they have coal. If they had natural gas their emissions would be lower too. They know coal is bad and as you've admitted yourself, their coal use is down in 2025. It's projected to decrease even further by 2035.

They're deploying solar and wind and nuclear at a never-seen-before pace. Their factories produce plentiful cheap panels and batteries and EVs that the rest of the world can use to decarbonize - so at least there's a point to "the highest emissions in the world". The US is approving data centers with on-site gas turbines, and paying off windmill operators to shut down.

They are not the same.

it’s very clear China optimized for its own citizens

Every country is supposed to do that. The current US administration is acting against its citizens' interests with its crusade against solar and wind energy.

in the face of the west trying to grapple with climate change

How is the west doing that? All I see are more SUVs and people protesting solar generation facilities in the country and calling renewable energy and bike lanes "woke" or some nonsense.

[China] is only now showing some signs of pivot with solar being cheap enough.

Who made solar so cheap, I wonder? Was it an accident or part of multiple 5-year plans that anyone can read?

And "some signs" is possibly the biggest understatement I've seen all year. They install more solar than the rest of the world combined.

Please, please re-examine your biases. Stop repeating the same conservative media lies. Start looking at the data objectively.

She says store-bought bread wins on convenience, just like SaaS apps. I'm making the case that, actually, it does not - even leaving aside freshness and quality and health.

Her unused breadmaker may be indicative of a skill issue or a more general disinterest in meal planning. Nothing wrong with that. It's just not an apt analogy (for me).

I read the article and it's a bit tricky to tease out but the negative association with spirits does exist. To summarize:

1. The quantity of alcohol consumed per occasion is most strongly associated with harms.

and

2. "The more alcohol was drunk per occasion, the higher the proportion of it which was drunk in the form of spirits"

The choice of beverage and how much was drunk was more dependent on cultural, social, and other factors.

My intuition tells me it's physically more difficult to consume more alcohol from a lower-strength beverage.

She's right about Saas. But breadmakers are not an example that land for me.

Breadmaker bread is cheaper, healthier, fresher, and more convenient in every way. I don't always eat bread for breakfast. If I want it tomorrow I have to remember to drive to the store today, costing me at least 15 minutes. Or I can spend 5 minutes setting up the machine before bedtime, and wake up to the smell of fresh bread.

You know your son well enough to say he wouldn't have done the grind by himself. But that's not the same as proving that coaching is always superior to grinding. Or that a motivated grinder can't beat a less motivated tutored student.

I appreciate your willingness to engage and your detailed responses. I understand where you're coming from, and that you've seen how the sausage is made.

In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.

Are money and other resources only helpful for getting a good test score? They don't matter at all for the factors that improve one's chances of admission? For example, going to a good high school district, participation in certain sports, hobbies, or access to internship, volunteer, or research opportunities?

My argument is simply: by making it about the test, you remove all the other factors where money could potentially have an influence. The rich students will get tutoring no matter what. But they can't gain any other advantages over the poor students.

In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group.

That wouldn't be a terrible approach either. You are correct it would be unsatisfying.

GPA and where they went to undergrad...were [both] hard metrics and full of bias.

I would argue they weren't "hard" at all. Undergrad is already gated by "squishy" criteria. Normalizing GPAs across universities (and countries, in the case of international applicants) is tricky and imprecise.

This is only true if you "sell" 40 shares immediately at the time of vesting to pay the tax bill

I wasn't aware there's a choice. That's a paycheck withholding essentially.

If an employee periodically vests a fixed number of shares, as opposed to a fixed dollar amount of shares, this is actually untrue.

Assume an employee's marginal tax rate is 40% and their capital gains rate is 15%. Then there are 2 scenarios:

1. Vest 100 shares at $100 apiece. After tax that's 60 shares * $100 = $6000 total.

2. A sudden price drop causes 100 shares to vest at $50. After tax that's 60 shares * $50 = $3000. Later the price rises to $100 and the employee sells them. Another $3000 in capital gains, leaving $2550 after taxes. Total = $5250.

Public opinion seems immune to reality though.

I still contend strongly that it is wrong to distill a person into a collection of numbers

No one's saying a person is a collection of numbers.

My point in telling this story is that the raw score in a standarized test can be helpful, but it does not tell a complete story. It is part of a broader assessment

And that's very noble and well-meaning. But it can also be used to discriminate and deny opportunity. Raw scores, on the other hand, are hard data. You either have them or you don't. Do factors outside of one's control go into them? Absolutely. Those factors are all-pervasive and will influence anything you might use to determine merit.

Kaplan, one of the test prep companies. They had very good data about how much their test prep improved test scores.

Of course they would say that. Even assuming it's true, Kaplan test prep books are only around $50 on Amazon. You could also get them for free from a public or school library (or the high seas, if that's your thing).

As I understand it, Kaplan has apps and dashboards and more material if you're a subscriber. Is there data about the marginal score improvement using that versus just the books?

When you get right down to it, everyone's starting point is different. Reducing the number of variables improves opportunity IMO.

But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education...Is it a university’s job to account for [my advantages]?

I would argue: no. There are always applicants with even more advantages than you, and those with fewer.

Standardized tests level the playing field IMO. Money can only help you so much. Talent and hard work become the dominant factors.

Mommy and daddy can't pay for expensive hobbies, finagle unpaid internships at prestigious non-profits, or anything else. Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding. Think Leetcode: how much does coaching help a SWE vs just being good at coding and solving 2000 problems?

Now you may say: under-privileged students often have less stable home environments. So they have less time to grind problems. This is true. But it's also true for admissions as they're done today. They have less time, money, and opportunities for hobbies, volunteer work, sports, and internships. They can't hire essay coaches or admissions consultants.

Thrusting students into a more challenging academic environment than their current demonstrated abilities merit doesn't help anyone. On the other hand if poorer students can demonstrate merit without spending much money, just by writing a single test, this is as egalitarian as possible.

The SAT has 2 components with separate scores. The SAT score is usually the sum of both, but there's no reason colleges can't weight one section more than the other.

If you really care about multiple dimensions, add more types of standardized tests - general science (or specialized - separate physics, chem and bio sections), history, geography, whatever.

Or tell students to take the standardized tests that most closely map to their preferred major.

in my experience Americans are Nazis about littering and recycling

I don't know about that. I've seen many a poorly sorted recycle bin in my life. Americans are definitely in the upper quartile, maybe even the upper decile, of the world as a whole. Among the developed world the country may be just about average.

I believe glass recycling is segregated by color in some countries in Europe. And they take that really seriously.

Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?

I think you've made up your mind regardless of facts or data.

Then it doesn't matter if the US reduces emissions or China does. They all count. The US has more money to spend on reducing emissions. Ergo it makes sense for the US to go first.

They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted

Europeans dumped plenty of greenhouse gases themselves.

Isnt China far worse thsn the US?

That's fossil fuel industry funded psyops.

Weird that there have been "immensely popular" politicians before but they didn't have "lawfare" deployed against them on this scale.

Also if these people are genuinely breaking the law, how would it go any differently?

So the voters too, then? They could've elected politicians who passed laws against this.

using the "following orders"/"food on the table" defense should be socially unacceptable...the parent seems to feel no guilt despite the many comments blaming him

Wild to compare implementing dark UX patterns to working at a concentration camp. Why not blame the electorate for voting poorly?

Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene

Why? According to Wikipedia they spend like $1.4b annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO That's like an extra $10 for each of these citizens living in "extreme poverty".

And what's the cutoff? Like 10% of the US population is under the poverty line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States. Is NASA "obscene" too? Granted that's not the same as "extreme poverty" but it's still a bad look in the richest country in the world, right?

unless it provides significant economic value

Investments in science and technology generally do. Rich countries are advanced in science and technology.

How did that help them?

And how does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?

That only matters if you want to know how much an average individual can spend. Gross GDP is more relevant when you're discussing how much the state could spend on defence programs.

I understand why it's good and necessary for the rural areas to have Starlink. I don't understand the big profit opportunity for Starlink in serving them.

Thanks Elon!