TomSwirly

103 ms·

961.
by TomSwirly 6y ago
Most of the rest of the world made at least some attempt to fight the virus. For them, the peak was weeks ago. The first COVID-19 case in the US was in January. The US government has failed to mount any sort of coherent response. Now 130,00
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
Yes, real world problems are hard. I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though? We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This e
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
> I find it really easy to share emotional vulnerability with strangers You and almost everyone else. It's much easier to be emotionally vulnerable using a "throw-away account". For an example, if you come out as gay to so
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying. Also,
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
Humans are made of cells but it's not a useful description of us for most purposes.
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
The picture isn't really so good for a lot of these startups, no. You know it in your heart. It's very unclear how an ethical person is supposed to be behave. If we believe that this huge machine is destroying the planet, surely
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
> Trying to push a certain set of values like this "This science disagrees with my political beliefs so it must be wrong." -you > there's certainly no objective measure of the value of preserving the environment vs peop
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
> However what is an important question is: Is world population growth exceeding our ability to engineer lower per-person resource usage? That's a trick question. The answer is that human population increases by about 1.1% a year;
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
I'm living in a seventy-year old building - maybe older. It's just lovely, I can't say enough good things about it. It has new windows and such, of focurse. Do it right in the first place and it will be livable forever. Peo
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
Houses in Europe have such building code requirements and yet don't seem outrageously expensive by any means. Shock! It turns out that doing it right at scale just isn't much harder, and pays society back in spades over the life
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
A lot of it also has to do with a broken court system. I now live in the Netherlands, and in the 80s, developers also started to pull this shit. Soon the lawsuits came, and very quickly they learned not to do this. Most Dutch people have b
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
Humans won't get it until they get their faces rubbed in it, and then it will be decades too late. We are evolved to react incredibly well at about a 100ms threshold. Through agriculture, humans have taught themselves to plan in terms
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
The reason you don't pull up those statistics is that they in fact completely contradict your claims. You might ask yourself why you feel the need to make things up?
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
Hear, hear. It's particularly ridiculous since some large portion of the people who end up with a counterfeit bill have no idea that it's fake... Once I pulled out a bunch of cash in a bar and exactly one bill, a $5, glowed brigh
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
If a truck driver stops to deal with a blown-out tire, they lose money. Delivery windows are incredibly short - there are bonuses for on-time deliver, and penalties for failure. So at least some truck drivers will ignore a blowout, particu
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
> When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed? When I lived in the United States, on the very rare occasion that a police officer was killed, our community would memoriali
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
All other police forces have the same problems. So why is the United States police unique amongst all other developed countries for its kill rate then? > Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a shar
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
YES, absolutely. I moved to Europe three years ago. Here, police outfits are designed to be seen in the dark, so they're day glo and neutral. In the US, police officers are terrifying creatures.
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
Hundreds of thousands of people are still in jail for drugs in the United States! Neither presidential candidate is for legalization of cannabis alone, and there is no talk of legalizing anything else. I hope one day the war on drugs will e
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by TomSwirly 6y ago
I'm probably older than the average YCer. I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write. However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it w