dcolkitt

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391.
by dcolkitt 5y ago
I'm virtually certain that the pandemic disrupted everyday life in NZ more than it did in Florida. Now more people died, but Florida demonstrates that even at the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic it's perfectly possible to live
392.
by dcolkitt 5y ago
There's no way to get the R0 of Delta below 1.0. Period. Even the strictest lockdown regiments have had transmission far above 1.0. The only reason Delta ever subsides (like in India) is when it burns through enough of the population t
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
The RAND healthcare study showed that drastic drops in medical expenditures had virtually no impact on mortality. Potentially even negative impact.[1] The reality is if you're a health adult, an overburdened ER or OR poses a very small
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Imagine if dirty needles started flying around randomly targeting children. It constantly shocks me that mosquito eradication is controversial, let alone not one of the highest priorities of society.
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Shocking to see how most criticism is just hand waving “technical and social issues” without citing any details. And when they do those “issues” are almost all out of date and ignore current technology. Crypto uses too much energy ignores E
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Okay, fair enough. But a major difference is that flu deaths are much more heavily burdened on the the young, whereas Covid is on the very elderly. The death of a 6 month old from flu results in approximately 20 times more QALY loss than an
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Socializing is extremely high friction in a mask. Pre-mask, I'd make small talk with store clerks or waiters all the time. After masking, I can count on one hand the number of times that happened. You struggle to understand people&#x27
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Exactly! I think we can all disagree about preferences and risk-tolerance and that's fine. Society is about learning to live with compromise. But what I don't like is how nobody will pre-commit ahead of time about what the accepta
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
The Covid death rate among vaccinated people is under 0.01%[1]. One hundred times worse than the current situation would make Covid not significantly worse than seasonal influenza for the vaccinated. Sure, one hundred times worse among thos
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
There’s a question of preferences that too often gets buried in this debate. If Covid becomes endemic at around its current severity, what level of pandemic restrictions are you willing to accept forever? For me personally, Covid would ha
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically unhealthy about processing foods. The issue is that if humans are exerting effort and money to process food, it’s almost always to make it more hyperpalatable, calorically denser and faster to di
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Cool! Thanks for deriving the equation. A lot about super massive black holes that become unintuitive at that scale. For example, I understand that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way has a lower density than iron.
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
There are many with crypto who struggle to get the normal banking system to touch their money. And, no, the vast majority of those are not engaged in any sort of illegal activity. It’d be much easier to just pay my mortgage in crypto, then
404.
by dcolkitt 5y ago
You can pull out home equity in a cash out refinance. Borrow at 2.5%, then roll that into index funds averaging 8%, and turbo-charge your retirement goals.
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
What short term profits? The car industry has among the lowest margins in the entire economy. Moreover the chips were never outsourced. Toyota never made its own chips, nor is it feasible to. You seem to have some sort of idealized view whe
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
I wish I could find an archive of Jason Pargin's old writings back from when he ran PointlessWasteOfTime.com under the David Wong handle. The Monkeysphere was a brilliant essay. https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_wha
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
The paper derived results for stellar mass black holes, but why not do the same for super massive black holes at the center of galaxies? Yes, this would be constrained to ultra-advanced type III civilizations. But it would let us search for
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
IQ is literally the strongest predictor of job performance across every category. Even stronger than years of experience in the job. This result has been replicated by industrial psychology resource again and again over decades. I get that
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very successful who aren't very bright. It's typical to see a small-to-medium business owner worth $20 million, who&#
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
> This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Kosovo? Bosnia?
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
I completely agree. But I object to OP’s characterization of “both sides are bad”. This is very much a case of evil triumphing over good. Not saying there are any other options at this point, but it’s stupid to celebrate a victory by the T
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
How is that relevant?
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Whatever valid criticisms exist, they’re simply incomparable to the insanely evil human rights abomination that is the Taliban. It’d be like asking after the Nazi invasion of France “why is nobody talking about the human rights abuses in Al
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
What is the practical roadmap for current Apple users who want to escape from this privacy boondoggle. I'm a longtime Mac and iPhone user, but will be switching all of our family's devices by the next upgrade. My only question is
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Only 7% of surveyed top economists disagreed with the statement that a wealth tax would be much more difficult to enforce than the existing tax code. https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/wealth-taxes/
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey. Now y
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
For those who are more domain knowledgeable in the logistics space, when can we expect these sporadic shortages to end? I know that there's a supply chain whipsaw effect. Where a disruption in one component leads to a delayed downstrea
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Elon Musk was worth more than $20 million before taking over Tesla and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos was worth more than $20 million before Amazon started AWS. Sergey and Larry were worth well more than $20 million before Google launched Gmail. Jack D
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Along the points you bring up, John Cochrane had a fantastic series about why wealth taxes are such a terribly economic inefficient mechanism to raise revenue and why virtually no economists support them. https://johnhcochrane.bl
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by dcolkitt 5y ago
Imposing a wealth cap like that is a fantastic way to assure that those basic needs will never be met. Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistr

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