beat

82 ms·

781.
by beat 8y ago
The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times?
782.
by beat 8y ago
It's not just Slack. It's our phones! Notifications are distraction engines. At the beginning of March, I went cold turkey on most social media (I still allow myself HN and a guitar player's forum), and completely cold turkey
783.
by beat 8y ago
How many of those people can afford a car?
784.
by beat 8y ago
Take a bike on public transportation for longer-distance routes. I don't know what sort of barbaric backwater you live in, but in my bike-friendly city, all the buses and light rail have bike racks, and bike commuters regularly use the
785.
by beat 8y ago
They almost certainly can't send him to Gitmo, if he's been extradited on formal charges. That puts him in the hands of the regular legal system. What makes Gitmo a special case is that it's an end-run around both American an
786.
by beat 8y ago
What does "makes sense" have to do with a conspiracy theory?
787.
by beat 8y ago
Of course 5 whys is no substitute for the scientific method. It isn't meant to be. Criticizing 5 ways because it's not good at science is unhelpful. It's a way to dig pretty deep into a problem very quickly with a simple heur
788.
by beat 8y ago
I really should find a name for this sort of fallacy (I'm sure some clever person has a clever name for it). "This is not perfect, therefore it is useless". I've seen this particular fallacy quite a bit on HN lately, and
789.
by beat 8y ago
The problem with 5 Whys? Taking it too literally, and then using this as basis for an argument criticizing the whole concept. To be fair, the idea of multiple root causes (and the difficulty 5 whys has in uncovering multiple causes) is impo
790.
by beat 8y ago
What's funny is that if a modern CEO said something like "We're going to pay our employees better so they can afford our product", it would be immediately seen as self-serving marketing nonsense to hide the actual truth.
791.
by beat 8y ago
Is an image of a sphere printed on paper three dimensional? Think about that for a moment, and you'll see the problem. I am not a physicist, but from my lay understanding, a black hole (and all other forms of matter) exists in a four-d
792.
by beat 8y ago
We're all idiots, my friend. Remembering that is the hardest and most important work we can do.
793.
by beat 8y ago
Worrying about discarded eyeglasses as an "environmental impact" issue is a classic example of bikeshedding. I'll burn more gasoline driving home from work than the mass of a pair of eyeglasses. And I'll burn it in a car
794.
by beat 8y ago
There's an easy, applicable step... don't have a bullshit job. Unfortunately, bullshit jobs tend to pay better. That's because without the money, no one would do them.
795.
by beat 8y ago
And Ford's wage increase has been famously and misleadingly mythologized as a favor he did to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars. Matthew Crawford's takedown of this bullshit in Shop Class as Soulcraft is delicio
796.
by beat 8y ago
Appropriate types and degrees of showmanship/salesmanship depend on the target customer. And scientists, by and large, don't seem to be concerned with impressing the general public - or at least, that is far secondary to the impor
797.
by beat 8y ago
Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect evidence. And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our senses
798.
by beat 8y ago
Github.io can build jeckyll for you, iirc. Netlify does the same thing, with more features. One Netlify feature I like is that if you host a domain with them, you can deploy branches to subdomains via git naming. This is good way to set up
799.
by beat 8y ago
The primary problem with petroleum is greenhouse gasses, so I'm far less concerned about its use in plastics than I am in its use for fuel.
800.
by beat 8y ago
Not the same. You don't use up the iron you mine in the mining process. That's what EROEI < 1 is, unless you get the energy input from some other source. And since anything that's in petroleum can be synthesized from simpl
801.
by beat 8y ago
I use it almost every day, to listen to my iPhone at work with the studio-grade headphones I've trusted for years (Beyerdynamic DT770). It works great and hasn't failed yet. Marvel indeed!
802.
by beat 8y ago
Eh. If it takes two barrels of oil to extract one barrel of oil, where do you get the energy for extraction? Then you're using solar/wind/nuclear to pump oil. At some point, it's cheaper to just synthesize.
803.
by beat 8y ago
On the other hand, there's nothing magical about petroleum that can't be synthesized, given enough energy (electricity from solar/wind works), and simple water/CO2/etc to provide the building blocks for long-chain h
804.
by beat 8y ago
What's lost in your analysis is that oil extraction is becoming increasingly expensive. Magic tech isn't making it cheaper; it's making it viable at all. Consider EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). This is how much e
805.
by beat 8y ago
How much oil is used in manufacturing materials, though, rather than as energy? I suspect that's a small percentage.
806.
by beat 8y ago
My favorite painting in the world is Jackson Pollock's Mural , his first major painting. It's owned by my alma mater the U of Iowa. The canvas is 9x20 iirc, just huge. They used to display it in a large central gallery, where you
807.
by beat 8y ago
I think of how many people read one of Ta-Nehisi Coates' exquisitely researched, half-hour-long read articles at the Atlantic, vs how many people click on a video of a cat falling off a dresser or something. Sigh.
808.
by beat 8y ago
Quitting drinking isn't a cure for alcoholism, either. But the problem isn't the alcoholism, it's the alcohol. Getting off of social media didn't make me a better person, but social media definitely made me a worse perso
809.
by beat 8y ago
I walked by a tv at work, and CNN was scrolling "BREAKING NEWS", with Trump talking, and I thought "What has he broken this time?" But I don't think the current distrust of media is about the inaccuracy of journalis
810.
by beat 8y ago
Extreme poverty and regular poverty are different things. Extreme poverty is nearly nonexistent in the US, but the regular poverty rate has been more or less static for decades (yes, I looked it up). Canada is making rapid progress on the r

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