cletus

84 ms·

661.
by cletus 5y ago
I see a lot of this on this topic. It's the fallacy of false equivalence. For example, the United States clearly has dark stains in its history. Slavery obviously, Japanese interment in WW2, the treatment of Native Americans (eg Trail
662.
by cletus 5y ago
> The government does not by any means micromanage or control even a tiny fraction of companies in China This is a straw man argument. No one accused China of micro-managing companies. It's never that overt. For example of how this
663.
by cletus 5y ago
You're going to have to clarify what you're talking about. These claims I've tended to find actually confuse several issues and misconstrue reality, intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the US has the FISA courts wi
664.
by cletus 5y ago
I view this as inevitable. Networking infrastructure has a valid national security interest. Companies in China are extensions of the state and tools of foreign policy. Sure these companies are notionally private but the people who own them
665.
by cletus 5y ago
That's not necessarily true. In determining priority categories, Congress is free to delegate that power to USCIS, the Secretary of Labor or another official or agency. It's worth nothing that all H1Bs are technically priority occ
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by cletus 5y ago
Two counterpoints: First, the H1B visa in particular is classified by law and by USCIS as an immigrant intent visa. That is to say that it's not incompatible with having intention to immigrate to the United States. Put another way: t
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by cletus 5y ago
This is a solvable problem. There are already categories for different occupations. You could put nurses (for example) in their own category with their own quota. Rand Paul, of all people, actually had a pretty reasonable alternative to the
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by cletus 5y ago
As someone who has gone through this process let me summarize some of the issues this always raises: 1. Green cards have a per-country cap (of 7%) but there is no per-country cap for work visas. This creates a bottleneck since India has the
669.
by cletus 5y ago
This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes: 1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wide
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by cletus 5y ago
If you think about this, this too is just an economic motive. The cost of non-compliance (fines, prosecution, etc) multiplied by the risk of that happening is less than the cost of compliance, so it happens. People and companies break laws
671.
by cletus 5y ago
Hot take: it doesn't matter who comes out in favour of stronger action on climate change. The only way we'll get significant change is when it becomes economic to do so. The world population or even a significant percentage of it
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by cletus 5y ago
What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't that many people around so finding land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would be tha
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by cletus 5y ago
The argument is that by growing your own marijuana you affect Congress's ability to regulate the interstate commerce of marijuana, which is consistent with Filburn. But where does that end? Can Congress prohibit you from earning an inc
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by cletus 5y ago
Just to add some context to this, this expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause really began with Wickard v. Filburn (1942) [1], more often just called Filburn. The essence of this decision was Federal policy in the Great Depression
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by cletus 5y ago
I don't believe that any Red Dwarf could be mistaken for a full Dyson Swarm. Some people more knowledgeable than me have put a lot of thought into the science of this. You can probably find a more satisfying answer. As for the second p
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by cletus 5y ago
First, you'd be surprised how many people we can support. Like we could likely support more than a trillion people on Earth. The population of a full Dyson Swarm around our Sun likely caps out in the quadrillions, possibly quintillions
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by cletus 5y ago
So the wavelength of black body radiation is called Wien's Law [1]. If you look at the electromagnetic spectrum [2], the IR spectrum is 25 μm to 2.5 μm. Compare those two and you'll see pretty much any reasonable range of temperat
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by cletus 5y ago
There are several differences between these old predictions and now: 1. We're now assuming based on the limits of known physics rather than the expected limits of technology. My father told me he once read a book that said it was impos
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by cletus 5y ago
Given these two constraints: 1. The speed of light is a hard speed limit. This means there's also no cheating with warp drives, other forms of FTL, crossing dimensions, parallel universes or time travel; and 2. The laws of thermodynami
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by cletus 5y ago
Asset forfeiture is one of those things that sounds almost reasonable, usually because it's pitched as seizing Pablo Escobar's Lamborghini or similar. But in reality it's open to abuse, routinely abused (as mentioned here) an
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by cletus 5y ago
Picking an arts degree wasn't you first mistake. It was a consequence of earlier mistakes. Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn. I'm sure if you did a 100 Intro to Programming cou
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by cletus 5y ago
First, a lot of space debris is small. I'm talking like flecks of paint. That's an issue at high speed and this has hit the ISS [1]. Obviously there's the conservation of momentum to deal with. That fleck of paint has a decen
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by cletus 5y ago
So here's a potential business model for this: salvage rights. When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the location of the wreck is known. Sometimes it needs to be found. It can cost a lo
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by cletus 5y ago
It's amazing how far Intel has fallen. The 10nm debacle exposed how far they've fallen behind on fabs to the point that they're outsourcing to TSMC. Like, how humiliating must that be? Intel completely missed the mobile revol
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by cletus 5y ago
The best analogy for this I've read is that your motion through spacetime is constant. Think of a quarter circle dial with an arrow that goes all the way from 0 degrees (no relative movement in space) to 90 degrees (relative speed of l
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by cletus 5y ago
I've been saying this for years now: this is why Apple should've ushered in lower commissions on larger publishers themselves because otherwise a court, a regulatory authority or a legislature was ultimately going to do it for the
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by cletus 5y ago
There's two sides to this actually. I, as a customer, don't want to pay many companies directly. The prime example is any news publication. There are many I'd happily pay for except (like gym memberships it seems) it can be i
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by cletus 5y ago
Estate taxes are ineffective as written at least right now in the US because they're too easy to avoid. But the idea of avoiding massive generational wealth is really what's key. It's just bad for society. As for the Covid-19
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by cletus 5y ago
Because the red states are being subsidized by the very blue states they claim are ruining the country. The red states are basically adult children complaining about their parents interfering in their lives while living rent-free in the bas
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by cletus 5y ago
Sometimes you see an argument that's based on one or even two bad facts such that it poisons all the fruits that come from it. It's a bit like a math exam where you start by making an error in the formula and then go from there. G

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