ksdale

38 ms·

361.
by ksdale 7y ago
Thanks for this! I think I saw a graph where food production was only 9% and so was quite a bit smaller than the categories of industry, transportation, and electricity, but that could have been American rather than global. For the sake of
362.
by ksdale 7y ago
I think an important question is how much slack does the system need? Such huge overproduction of food seems wasteful until there's a risk of famine. As the effect of coronavirus on supply chains is currently demonstrating, there are p
363.
by ksdale 7y ago
I believe the parent is referring to the fact that there have been large earthquakes with remarkable regularity in the PNW every ~500 years for the past few thousand years, and it's been well over 500 years since the last one.
364.
by ksdale 7y ago
It's easy to score 1 or 2 touchdowns on accident, even against the best defense in the league. No one scores 50 points on accident, especially against solid opponents.
365.
by ksdale 7y ago
I played a lot of American football growing up and so heard the quote "Defense wins championships" very regularly and I always disagreed. Teams lose games all the time while holding the other team to a very low score, but almost n
366.
by ksdale 7y ago
Exactly, I commented above about how the cheating doesn't bother me that much, and I didn't say this because I didn't want to sound flippant, but sports are so not important enough to warrant government involvement.
367.
by ksdale 7y ago
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I've always just assumed that everyone in pro sports is cheating in basically every way they think they can get away with. I never had a problem with Lance Armstrong cheating because I assumed everyone
368.
by ksdale 7y ago
I believe there was a quote from the Twitter account of an epidemiologist in Hong Kong to the effect that if the disease was left unchecked it would reach that many people.
369.
by ksdale 7y ago
That sounds like a just so story to me, though. They could spend way more on lobbying, and get more - more subsidies, more tax incentives, etc. but they don't. It seems very unlikely to me that they get everything they could possibly
370.
by ksdale 7y ago
Why do they lobby as much as they do if they’re getting everything they want?
371.
by ksdale 7y ago
Also, corporations spend surprisingly little, like, a rounding error compared to how much they could spend. And there's a cynical response that they are gaining influence in other ways, but it's not like we usually model corporati
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by ksdale 7y ago
SlateStarCodex has a relevant post on money in politics - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
373.
by ksdale 7y ago
I've often had an experience, when reading or watching a fictionalized account of some dramatic thing from history, where I feel exasperated that they didn't just use the real story - "Why would they make this up?? The thing
374.
by ksdale 7y ago
I agree completely with your first sentence. I feel like when reading history, though, there is what happened, and there is the story about what happened. Sometimes it's basically impossible to have one without the other, but sometimes
375.
by ksdale 7y ago
I picked it up because it is so frequently recommended on HN, and it is much less...academic(?) than I was hoping for. It gets recommended as a great explanation of debt, but it read a lot more like a very biased opinion about debt coupled
376.
by ksdale 7y ago
Right, I was just responding to the parent's assertion that preventing a monopoly doesn't require propping up competitors. Sometimes it does require that, and we should be conscious of the trade off we'd make in that situatio
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by ksdale 7y ago
That's easier said than done. Often times, refusing to allow a merger will mean that one of the competitors will just go out of business, and avoiding that will require propping up a competitor.
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by ksdale 7y ago
I think from an aesthetic perspective, there's no difference between large and small, but from an efficiency perspective, sometimes it's important for things to be large. And this isn't heartless, capitalist efficiency, somet
379.
by ksdale 7y ago
I think some people get their enjoyment out of hyper-optimization rather than the hobby itself, which is also fine.
380.
by ksdale 7y ago
Savers may not invest in high risk businesses, but the opposite of saving is not investing, it's spending, generally on consumer goods rather than on anything "productive". There's a different conversation to be had abou
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by ksdale 7y ago
Most people don't die from old age and nothing else, though. If someone doesn't die from lung cancer, they're most likely going to die from some other kind of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, or some kind of
382.
by ksdale 7y ago
A lot of preventative care just delays old-age care rather than avoiding it entirely. I remember a professor in law school saying that during the big tobacco trials, someone mentioned that people dying younger from smoking meant lower healt
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by ksdale 7y ago
My dad was a great athlete growing up, and a common way that athletes deal with pain is to rest for a while and then gradually return to exercise. As he got older, he followed the same routine, except like many aging Americans, he basically
384.
by ksdale 7y ago
Haha yeah exactly. I think this dynamic exists in a lot of places. I feel like there should be a phrase that communicates something like "I know you're acting in good faith, but I'm just trying to be cautious." Because i
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by ksdale 7y ago
I'm an attorney, not a doctor, but from my perspective, rising malpractice rates are connected to burnout because they indicate a working environment that feels hostile. Doctors generally become doctors because they want to help people
386.
by ksdale 7y ago
This reminds me of the Jevons paradox from economics. The story is that when steam engines became way more efficient, the demand for coal exploded. Even though each engine used much less energy, the total amount of energy consumed went thro
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by ksdale 7y ago
Definitely! You'll get no argument from me there! I'd add a bunch of apps to that list as well.
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by ksdale 7y ago
Tyler posts all the time about music, literature, food, and travel. I think he's perfectly aware of what's required to increase quality of life. I think this list mostly demonstrates that he believes there are certain people and i
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by ksdale 7y ago
I think you are spot on with your reasons for why these things actually do exist, but I think there is definitely an argument to be made for why they should actually protect privacy instead of merely inhibiting the government. My version
390.
by ksdale 7y ago
This is a great point, but I think it cuts both ways. If a place doesn't get electrified until it can be done so with renewables, then there are people who e.g. are dying from the pollution from their wood cook fires in the meantime. I

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