InclinedPlane

16 ms·

91.
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Read this twitter thread commentary instead: https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1085230966833065984
92.
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Good for short-term results, bad at the degree to which it indicates our institutions are ineffectual and broken. America is a rich nation, Seattle is a rich city. With reasonable taxation and competent government we could easily maintain d
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Targeted ads are almost universally pretty terrible. My reaction to seeing a targeted ad usually falls into one of these categories: - I already bought that recently, why would I need another one? - I already decided which variety of thing
94.
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
This is not an insane puzzle, it's very, very simple. "Brexit" is possible, but it would be in all cases disastrous for Britain. This is obvious. But Brexiters don't want a real-world Brexit they want a fantasy land Brex
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Northern Ireland definitely prefers very much to remain in the EU, whether they want to join the Irish Republic is a separate issue, but it's easy to see them splitting away within the next decade or so. "The United Kingdom of Eng
96.
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Yes, of course. We've spiked CO2 levels like crazy. We've slathered our farms, our lawns, our houses with organophosphates and neonicotinoids. And still we think that these things are small problems requiring maybe some little inc
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Well, for one, they can maybe be hopeful that money set aside for keeping down the fire risk by trimming trees near power lines/stations wouldn't be diverted to executive bonuses, as PG&E did.
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
There's lots of different ways to approach explaining the phenomenon of hawking radiation, PBS space time does a good job here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKj0YnKANw Ultimately, hawking radiation does not come fr
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
See also: the police. (Relevant book: The End of Policing)
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
They're both awful. Why is that hard to understand?
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
In theory memristors should be faster than flash and with significantly better write endurance. Additionally, the memristor can be used as the basis of computing. Meaning you could potentially create a device which had programmable logic li
102.
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Exactly! We should use the system the majority of the developed world relies on: socialized medicine.
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Except this hasn't been true since about 1980. Gains from economic growth have not been passed on to everyone. Health care is not available for everyone, especially. This isn't just a matter of technology. The "cost" of
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
What are you studying, out of curiosity?
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Yeah, you're probably right, I'm sure it's just horse ownership and free preschool rather than income stagnation, exploding debt in the under 35 age bracket (much of it due to student loan burden), and massively increasing ho
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
I don't give a shit even if we ultimately have to pay more than we are now on healthcare (spoilers, we won't) as long as we can have universal coverage.
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
This is not an explanation. The amount of money spent on actual drug R&D in the US is a tiny blip compared to the excess costs in the whole system.
108.
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Look at the graph of spending on children, look at how the lines for the bottom 3 quintiles have gone down since the '80s and '90s. That's very disheartening to see, parents are going to try their hardest to give their kids t
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Fortunately no policy of the US government has ever had an impact on how children are brought up. /s
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Overdose deaths have quadrupled since the '90s alone, suicide rates have increased by about 30%, as have alcohol related deaths.
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
It's easy to forget that the purpose of parenting and raising children isn't to baby sit them for 18 years, cram them full of "information" and then turn them loose on the world. The purpose is to incrementally transfo
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
If you are "verified" on twitter and your profile information calls you out as public official then your twitter account is no longer just your personal play pen, it's an official means of public communication. This is a cho
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
That's also only one tiny aspect to logging. Loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, micro-climatic shifts, the impact on streams, all can be devastating in isolation, let alone together. Saying that you can plant new trees to replace old
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
There's is a mathematically correct answer for this problem given their decimal representation. That's the correct answer for the math, period. What "good enough" behavior is for a system that uses numbers under the hood
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
The point is that this reveals a common weakness in most programming languages. Not that floating point math has limits, but that this isn't well communicated to the user. One of the hallmarks of good programming language design is the
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
More nuclear waste please! Nuclear waste is comparatively easy to handle. A single country is capable of handling its own nuclear waste and keeping it safe (as France does, for example). The same is not true of CO2 emissions and global clim
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Most "valuable", certainly, especially at the height of the speculative bubble, but in terms of actually generating net positive cash flow from ongoing revenues?
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
1. Adjust your side mirrors so they have minimal overlap in coverage, which means you get maximum overall field of view. 2. Check your mirrors routinely (though not constantly, that can be distracting in itself). Stuff doesn't just sne
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
My one major criticism of this advice is that it significantly downplays the importance of communicating clearly among technical people. It's tempting to think this is "easy" but I've seen countless examples among top de
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by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Of course they focused on the iPhone. As a corporation you can't blame them, focusing on that market led to them becoming the most profitable company in the history of capitalism on the planet Earth, to say that a publicly traded compa

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