jlmorton

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391.
by jlmorton 6y ago
> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. The reality is tha
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by jlmorton 6y ago
It just so happens that minor refactoring is far and away the larger use case. That seems like a pretty good win.
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by jlmorton 6y ago
That's a good point. But I'm not sure it's quite as simple as you make it sound to construct a dam with 2.5 million cubic meters of concrete, divert all of the water for a major drainage basin into the newly-created reservoi
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Right, anyone on American soil, including foreign-owned corporations, are protected by the First Amendment. How else are they going to disseminate media in the United States? They certainly could disseminate it via the Internet, but then t
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Even that is not true. There is no criminal law against defamation, or libel. There are civil liabilities, but they almost always require the defendant to show commercial damages. The standard in the United States is that the information
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Freedom of speech is not just to protect the speaker, it's to protect the rights of the citizens to hear it. Foreign propaganda is explicitly legal and protected in the United States. I'm sorry that you think it should not be, bu
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by jlmorton 6y ago
> there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform. And who cares if they are? We live in an open society, and in the US, freedom of speech is a foundational principle. This is among the trade
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by jlmorton 6y ago
That's not quite true. The cost of producing shale oil has continued to fall. It started out high, but the industry breakeven price is now $48, and some producers can be profitable as low as $31.
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Okay, I'll bite. I don't think John Podesta has officially commented on what the emails mean, but I think it's pretty safe to assume it is actually quite literal, and they were indeed talking about a handkerchief, a map, and
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by jlmorton 6y ago
> How have consumers been harmed by the Instagram acquisition? Facebook didn't shut them down, substantially change the product, or force users to use their other products. Consumers have been fairly directly harmed, actually. Face
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Antitrust legislation is not designed to protect other companies, it's designed to protect consumers. In the United States, when the Justice Department blocks a merger, it is not simply deciding to disallow the merger. It does not hav
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Note that our very best IR telescopes have a resolution great enough to detect an IR signature of a Dyson swarm at a distance of about 0.2 kiloparsecs, or ~600 light years. That is a very, very small area of the universe. If there was a Dys
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by jlmorton 6y ago
The number of deaths for the SF Bay Area is not 58, either. It is: San Francisco: 47 Alameda: 116 Santa Clara: 152 San Mateo: 99 Contra Costa: 50 Marin: 18 Solano: 23 In other words, about ~500 deaths. If you had 60% of the population inf
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by jlmorton 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're talking about daily deaths, or in total, but California has had 5,286 deaths as of today, not 58. We also had 81 deaths today specifically. In a perfect world, the point of a lockdown is to arrest the sprea
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Talk about a strange comment. Taiwan's email did not inform the WHO of anything at all. In fact, it is best described as nothing more than a wild-ass guess. China notified the WHO on December 31st of a cluster of cases of pneumonia o
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by jlmorton 6y ago
The WHO certainly never claimed that SARS-CoV-2 does not spread between people. They said human-to-human transmission had not been confirmed. The very first signs of human-to-human transmission in the epidemic were on Jan 14th, as some fam
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by jlmorton 6y ago
> Yikes. How are they determining if a resident moved away from CA? What about if they're dead? What about if they're voting for another relative, friend, or neighbor that isn't paying attention? I think it's strange
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by jlmorton 6y ago
Well, California had 8.5 million mail-in ballots in the last national election, 65% of the total. Mail-in voting in California was available to everyone even before this, not just to people meeting special criteria. This just makes it the
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by jlmorton 6y ago
It's not like this is some new method of voting. We already have mail-in voting in California. This just expands it. Oregon has been entirely vote-by-mail since the 1980s. There is no fraud. You know why there's no fraud? Bec
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by jlmorton 6y ago
That's not exactly true this time. The airlines, for instance, are getting about $35 billion in outright grants, and $15 billion in loans and warrants equal to 10% of the total. The large part of it is free money, and many major US ai
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by jlmorton 7y ago
Note that the rule separately exempts franchise models. This is a bit different than that. This exempts restaurants and hotels that are all owned by a single entity, as long as the individual restaurant, or hotel is a subsidiary with fewer
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by jlmorton 7y ago
I get your point, but loophole has a specific meaning that implies taking advantage of an ambiguity, unexpected complexity, or oversight in drafting to reach an unintended result. This was not unintentional, and I think that's importa
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by jlmorton 7y ago
To be clear, this was not a loophole, it was a carve out. They specifically and intentionally excepted restaurants and hotels from the affiliation rule. It wasn't a drafting error, it was a clear and purposeful choice. Personally, I
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by jlmorton 7y ago
Only 3 petabytes? At $0.01/GB/Month, it seems that works out to about $360,000/year in storage costs alone. Cheers, but you're paying for this just as a public service?
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by jlmorton 7y ago
This is not just a guy on Twitter, he's a well-known reporter for Mother Jones Magazine. What he's saying does not dispute anything in the well-cited Reddit post. It just offers new information which paints it in an entirely diff
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by jlmorton 7y ago
Please see a follow-up from Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland [1]. While the Reddit thread accurately described that these domain names were all purchased by a single entity, it appears that this entity is not a shadowy conservative astrotu
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by jlmorton 7y ago
> This sounds like circular logic - how we know it indeed started in January and not before? Indeed, without serological testing, we're necessarily making some assumptions. But there's other evidence that points this way, too.
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by jlmorton 7y ago
We already have lots of data that says this is not true. For instance, on the Diamond Princess, widespread testing of a confined group initially found many asymptomatic infections, but the majority of those turned out to be pre-symptomatic
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by jlmorton 7y ago
Here's a genetic analysis that was widely shared last month, which points to an index patient in late November around Wuhan: https://bedford.io/blog/ncov-cryptic-transmission/ Here's an article from Feb
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by jlmorton 7y ago
How are companies incentivized to layoff staff through PPP? My understanding is one of the eligibility requirements is that you can't have reduced your staff since Feb 15th, and if you have, you need to re-hire them to become eligible

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