majos

9 ms·

31.
by majos 7y ago
Other coverage of this bill suggests McConnell is OK with passing something he sees as imperfect, given cover from Trump. > Should the White House and House Democrats come to terms, Mr. McConnell has indicated privately that he would qui
32.
by majos 7y ago
What’s with the flood of downvotes on this comment? It’s civil, relevant, and contributes to discussion of the topic. Maybe you disagree with its conclusion, but that’s not what downvotes are for.
33.
by majos 7y ago
I’m surprised by the lack of temperature screening, especially in airports. It doesn’t seem hard to implement. We can at least strongly encourage individuals with fevers to self-quarantine and monitor. Baseless conjecture, but I think inst
34.
by majos 7y ago
This seems enormously complicated. How can the government reliably assess lost revenue? What about businesses whose expenditures were always unrealistic and a temporary closure pushed them over the edge, should they be covered too? Note t
35.
by majos 7y ago
> It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue. True, but maybe we disagree on how easy it is for every locality to acquire expertise. Plenty of local governments in the United States are alread
36.
by majos 7y ago
You can normally hear Carmelo Anthony calling for rebounds over the crowd, music, commentators, and probably your own internal monologue, so people have had some practice.
37.
by majos 7y ago
> local health departments in the US often literally could not test for the coronavirus, even though they had the tools and the capacity and the desire to make tests, because they didn't have federal approval But that’s a judgement
38.
by majos 7y ago
None of these occurred on anywhere near the current spread or scale. SARS and MERS were almost entirely confined to Asia, Ebola to West Africa, and Zika to South America. The last was most widespread but was still limited to about 10,000 ca
39.
by majos 7y ago
My read from the US is different. I think over the past 20 years Americans have seen coverage of many scary diseases from afar (SARS, west nile, zika, MERS, ebola). None of these had a large impact on American society. So these experiences
40.
by majos 7y ago
Why is this evidence that “we need to abolish centralized institutions”? It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue. Perhaps the WHO misjudged the coronavirus, but I’m confused about how this is suddenly a r
41.
by majos 7y ago
At least one Harvard undergrad has pointed out concrete flaws in implementation of this policy, and how it affects him personally [1]. That said, I also sympathize with administrators, who had to pick a course of action in a chaotic enviro
42.
by majos 7y ago
Confused, you think it’s just too improbable to believe that MIT admitted 60 kids whose parents make <25k yearly? MIT can cherry pick the highest achieving kids in pretty much any national, heck even global, cohort. It seems reasonable t
43.
by majos 7y ago
The Economist even wrote about force majeure a couple of weeks ago [1]. Gist was that Chinese firms may use it to void contracts, and Chinese courts may uphold these choices to the frustration of Western companies. This probably also appl
44.
by majos 7y ago
Related, but not exactly on topic: what do people make of the word “depressed”? I am unsure whether people use the word to mean “a deep lack of any enjoyment that persists for a long period of time (weeks?)” or something stronger, which add
45.
by majos 7y ago
This article, and other writings on covid-19 I have read recently, makes the weird choice to treat "panic" and "take threat seriously" as synonyms. As far as I can tell, they aren't. If you look up panic in your fav
46.
by majos 7y ago
I get this logic, and it would fit better with the rest of my personality if I treated books this way, but I don't. Instead I have maybe 100 books, 90% read, even after culling stuff I don't like about once per year. And my defaul
47.
by majos 7y ago
Whoa, you weren't kidding. I was prepared for a low-effort Medium post given the formula "what a slight variation on trend X taught me about topic Y". Instead, this is by turns an essay about: Chinese life under effective loc
48.
by majos 7y ago
Not a biologist, but reading the paper, the chain of reasoning appears to be summarized in this section: > Taken together, the neuroinvasive propensity has been demonstrated as a common feature of CoVs. In light of the high similarity b
49.
by majos 7y ago
I think you’re right, edited. As far as I can tell they’re using this number as a baseline for wage increases so the rest of the comment should still hold.
50.
by majos 7y ago
Passenger traffic between the USA and the rest of the world was about 20m in March 2019. Not all of this is into the USA, but a sizable fraction must be. Quarantining millions of people in the USA sounds extremely hard.
51.
by majos 7y ago
Tangent, but 3000 times per day is about once every 20s awake. That seems high?
52.
by majos 7y ago
"They say that if you give a chimpanzee a screwdriver, he’ll break it; if you give a gorilla a screwdriver, he’ll toss it over his shoulder; but if you give an orangutan a screwdriver, he’ll open up his cage and walk away." (From:
53.
by majos 7y ago
Can you provide a pointer to such surveys? In my head the popularity of articles bashing tech companies is out of proportion to people's patronage of those same companies, but numbers would be nice.
54.
by majos 7y ago
If anyone reacts as I did and wonders how it's possible to compete in Tai Chi, the competitive sport [1] is not the slow-movements-in-the-park activity I had in mind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_hands
55.
by majos 7y ago
It’s not meant to be negative, just in the sense of “a commonly occurring rhetorical device”.
56.
by majos 7y ago
There are a couple of HN tropes that are very similar, but not identical, to this idea. 1. "Growth mindset" 2. "90th percentile expertise in two areas is easier to achieve and more useful than 99th percentile in one" Thi
57.
by majos 7y ago
Hm. There’s another comment above along the lines of: “I worked with these stores, they are all selling random wildly overpriced garbage, don’t fall for it!”. I’m confused now.
58.
by majos 7y ago
I still suspect that the average dollar expended by the US government has way lower return in expected improvement of human utility than basic scientific research, even with all its imperfections. As long as that’s true, the case for fundin
59.
by majos 7y ago
I’m confused. Seems natural for us to look for intelligent signals from space, since unintelligent life is not going to put together the machinery to send interstellar messages. How do you think we should be searching? It’s fine to say we’r
60.
by majos 7y ago
A few years ago I visited Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden, walked around for a bit, then sat and read on a bench (Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk ) for a couple of hours as the sun set. I happened to read a particularly affecting sect

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