pjscott

11 ms·

91.
by pjscott 3y ago
If you had continued reading, you would have seen that the author opposes punishing families and is using this as an example case for a philosophical argument.
92.
by pjscott 3y ago
If a policy will predictably backfire, but the EU passes it anyway because the policy has good intentions, I would actually describe that as the EU's fault.
93.
by pjscott 3y ago
In a lot of states it’s illegal to charge money for the use of a restroom due to lobbying by the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America in the 1970s. (Of course, the unintended but entirely predictable consequence is that in a lot of place
94.
by pjscott 3y ago
When insurance companies are legally forced to choose between providing insurance at a loss and not providing it at all, they'll predictably choose the latter. I have to wonder: who on earth thought those price-restriction laws were a
95.
by pjscott 3y ago
Yeah, this is the thing that bothers me about people's response to robo-taxis. They're not compared to human drivers, who make mistakes all the time. They're compared to a theoretical ideal of perfection, and people get outra
96.
by pjscott 3y ago
As an American, it blew my mind to see people in Taiwan carrying around plastic bags of hot soup. It makes perfect sense from a physics standpoint, and the convenience of it was obvious, so my mind was only blown momentarily – but it was ju
97.
by pjscott 3y ago
One thing to keep in mind when reading this article is that human cognition always halts after some number of decades. “Finite” does not mean small or insignificant, and it’s easy to read too much into even the best-reasoned impossibility
98.
by pjscott 3y ago
You're pointing at something real and important, but I think you've misdiagnosed the problem. We are spending more -- but we're getting a lot less bang for the buck, because costs in those sectors are spiraling out of contr
99.
by pjscott 3y ago
You're somewhat misremembering a real thing. It's possible to profit by donating a piece of art to a museum and claiming its value to be much greater than what you'd get on the open market. This is tax fraud, though, and th
100.
by pjscott 3y ago
> 1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first
101.
by pjscott 3y ago
I can't argue with your aesthetic preferences, but you haven't yet stated a concrete harm.
102.
by pjscott 3y ago
> Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama! Is this bad on net? From what I've heard, the main political difference between the rich and the rest of the population is that they tend to be more pro-b
103.
by pjscott 3y ago
> The old "i'm a philanthropist! (and totally not doing it for the tax breaks)" nonsense, How does this work? Suppose that someone donates $1 million to charity. They don't pay income tax on that money -- but they no
104.
by pjscott 3y ago
I'm not understanding the causation here. Some people are very rich, yes, but how does that harm the people who aren't rich?
105.
by pjscott 3y ago
The following can both be true, and IMO both are true: 1. The vast majority of right-wing content goes uncensored. 2. A few really choice targets for censorship get categorized as "misinformation", "disinformation", or
106.
by pjscott 3y ago
Just about every personality trait with a name has a high degree of genetic heritability. We know this from e.g. studies of identical versus fraternal twins. And people abused as children tend to be closely related to their parents; we know
107.
by pjscott 3y ago
In prison on what charges? In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the parts concerning habeas
108.
by pjscott 3y ago
Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-po
109.
by pjscott 3y ago
The idea behind delaying algebra is that if you teach math more slowly, the people who do worst in math will be able to progress somewhat further because they have more time to drill and repeat things. Someone who would have received an F i
110.
by pjscott 3y ago
In the US, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending on public education has roughly doubled in the past 50 years. If money were the real constraint, I would expect 1970s schools to be absolutely horrible compared to the schools today -- but st
111.
by pjscott 3y ago
Billionaires aren't the unlimited money piñata that you might hope; their total assets are less than federal yearly tax revenues, and good luck getting even a tiny fraction of that per year. As for corporations, I assume you're pr
112.
by pjscott 3y ago
Would the story be fine if you just hadn’t heard of the drama? (If so, then bringing it up might not be the best thing you could do here.)
113.
by pjscott 3y ago
“Practically human speed” is exactly what they’re aiming for. It’s meant to be used in human-speed applications, and to be as slow as possible in those use-cases without causing perceptible lag.
114.
by pjscott 3y ago
They're almost certainly not going to stop making Instant Pots. This is a chapter 11 bankruptcy -- the kind where the business gets restructured but continues to operate.
115.
by pjscott 3y ago
Treating Unicode strings as a sequence of code points is a completely valid thing to do, but is usually not what you actually care about when dealing with text. Really, are code points any less of an implementation detail?
116.
by pjscott 3y ago
So, to be clear: the police stole a bunch of phones, some of which had the passcode disabled, and sold them without wiping the data... and you place the blame on the phone manufacturer? The only people in this story who haven't messe
117.
by pjscott 3y ago
The problem is that about 20% of the phones in the study had the passcode disabled, and another 5% had easy-to-guess passcodes.
118.
by pjscott 3y ago
Any investment that includes stock can go down in value. That doesn't make it a scam.
119.
by pjscott 3y ago
Thank you. We are nowhere close to the Pareto-efficient frontier for risk reduction. We could be safer, while sacrificing much less prosperity for that safety, if things were structured better. (The optimal number of plane crashes is not
120.
by pjscott 3y ago
Making it part of the cost of doing business is precisely the point -- you allow business to go on when it passes a cost/benefit test, and the business tries to minimize that cost by taking safety measures. There's a middle ground

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