NickM

11 ms·

91.
by NickM 3y ago
“It works for me” does not imply “it can’t possibly be a placebo”. Both could be true. I’m not saying the blue light thing is or isn’t real, but I see this kind of argument made all the time, and I can’t tell if people just don’t understand
92.
by NickM 3y ago
I wonder if it also factors in travel for remote employees though. Every fully remote company I’ve ever worked for has had regular in-person meetups where people fly to some central location a few times a year.
93.
by NickM 3y ago
Well, I was with you until that last sentence.
94.
by NickM 3y ago
Most of the resources people are competing for are also produced by humans, so I don't think that reducing the population would necessarily improve the collective standard of living, because you reduce the supply of goods and services
95.
by NickM 3y ago
Well, sure, there are lots of things that could happen in the world that would be even better than a $400M donation like this, but that doesn't make a $400M donation a bad or pointless thing. Nor does it make this donation somehow
96.
by NickM 3y ago
Just because they could afford to give more doesn't make this money meaningless. I'm not saying we need to like, bow down and praise Bezos over this, or that it erases any other bad things he may have done...but let's try to
97.
by NickM 3y ago
The trouble is that the placebo effect has been repeatedly demonstrated to be extremely, profoundly strong for depression and anxiety treatments. Yes research has found improvements when you put people on SSRIs, but double blind placebo c
98.
by NickM 3y ago
Everyone fall somewhere on the hoarding spectrum. I am guilty of keeping things that may some day be useful. I mean, sure, but there's a pretty stark difference between "oops, this didn't turn out to be useful after all&quo
99.
by NickM 3y ago
Gentrification and unbalanced income strata are real things and real problems, but the 1% aren’t causing them simply by existing. This hits the nail on the head. It's tautological to say "the problem of inequality is caused by t
100.
by NickM 3y ago
If it isn’t harmful That’s a big “if” though.
101.
by NickM 3y ago
If you think that’s bad, go look up some SSRI meta analyses. The average HAM-D improvement vs placebo is only about 2 points.
102.
by NickM 3y ago
They currently don't allow individuals to e-file unless they either: 1. Acquire commercial software, or; 2. Hire a paid preparer to file it, or; 3. Use "Free File Fillable Forms" (but this isn't an option if you fall int
103.
by NickM 3y ago
Hypothetically, if we did end up with a worldwide superconducting energy grid, this would smooth load, which I would expect would make generation cheaper (since we can get rid of the need for expensive peaker plants and/or stationary s
104.
by NickM 3y ago
I understand you guys hate him because the media basically tells you to and because he doesn't behave like your average tech founder I was with you until this part. I used to be a Musk fan but he's done a lot of things to make
105.
by NickM 3y ago
You would think that, but the quotes in the article from the relevant officials seem to imply otherwise.
106.
by NickM 3y ago
so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant Sure, if the complaint rate per mile is constant, but the number of driverless cars increases exponentially, then yeah we might expect the number of complaints to increase exponentially.
107.
by NickM 3y ago
If you actually look at the article, it has the numbers in absolute terms. In April '22 (the earliest month on the chart) there were 3 reports. Following that, we have something that looks like an exponential curve leading to a year la
108.
by NickM 3y ago
When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". The article actually has quantitative data that shows reports of "incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and em
109.
by NickM 3y ago
Yes, that would be more efficient, but there are so many edge cases where switching an existing home to use heat pumps is prohibitively difficult or expensive. Maybe you have radiators that require higher temps than can be efficiently produ
110.
by NickM 3y ago
Continuing to operate existing nuclear plants seems like a good idea, but that’s a totally separate debate than whether we should build new ones.
111.
by NickM 3y ago
the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest Simplest chemically != simplest to use in practice. There are already millions of miles of natural gas pipelines leading directly to peoples' homes, and those
112.
by NickM 3y ago
Because it's currently much more expensive than solar and wind, even when you factor in the costs of dealing with intermittency. Even if public perception weren't an obstacle, and even if you didn't have to deal with waste st
113.
by NickM 3y ago
Sure, but if we could reuse the coal infrastructure as part of a transition away from fossil fuels, why wouldn't we consider that? Unlike methane, coal is mostly just used for power generation, and there's relatively little infras
114.
by NickM 3y ago
Is that true of toxins that accumulate in the body generally, or specific known classes? I don't know, I'm definitely no expert in this area, and haven't looked for any similar studies for other toxins, so I'm not sure
115.
by NickM 3y ago
I can't find a public link to the actual paper, but here's an article that covered the research and summarizes the findings: https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26&#x2F
116.
by NickM 3y ago
There are other potential health upsides too. Regular blood donation has been found to be correlated with healthier blood pressure, and in men it can also prevent you from accumulating too much iron in your body, which can prevent heart pro
117.
by NickM 3y ago
As an individual, you can donate blood regularly. There was a study done that found that repeated whole blood or plasma donations were both effective at reducing PFAS levels over time.
118.
by NickM 3y ago
A typical iPhone battery is on the order of 10 Wh. An iPad is more like 40 Wh. If you add up all the iPhones and iPads in the world, the combined battery storage is probably on the order of tens of GWh. If the load shifting that this featur
119.
by NickM 3y ago
Lyme isn't even the worst thing you can get from ticks. If you really want to scare yourself, read up on Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Powassan virus, Ehrlichiosis, etc. etc.
120.
by NickM 3y ago
Okay, so when the bird flu hit and suddenly there were way less eggs to go around, what if companies had kept egg prices exactly the same? The result of that would be that all the eggs would sell out and we'd have empty shelves, since

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