pjscott

15 ms·

121.
by pjscott 3y ago
Indeed, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
122.
by pjscott 3y ago
The usual hack for dealing with this is to require liability insurance. The insurer has incentives to set premiums at a level that reflect risk, along with reasonable contract conditions -- e.g. "Put guards on all your rotary saws, and
123.
by pjscott 3y ago
> They mention, but don't really endorse, liability law models. But today's adversarial legal model in the US is also slow, expensive, and results in tons of cover-your-ass legalese at large places. They allude to no-fault work
124.
by pjscott 3y ago
> The regulator can still set legal penalties high enough to stop any innovation, if they want to. A liability model has a couple of advantages despite this: 1. The regulator has some slack to not set penalties insanely high. As long a
125.
by pjscott 3y ago
The old ones where everything is behind the counter, fetched for you by the checkout clerk, to prevent shoplifting? I've seen the pictures, and I never want to go back to that kind of low-trust society. Please, I'm begging everyon
126.
by pjscott 3y ago
In healthier workplace cultures, this kind of don't-give-a-shit behavior is socially stigmatized, while behaving like someone who wants to do things right is socially rewarded. It's easy to forget, but not all incentives are mea
127.
by pjscott 3y ago
Those are functioning communication satellites, not yet junk. At the end of their (fairly short) planned lifetimes, they will use their maneuvering thrusters to de-orbit. And even if that fails, they're in a low enough orbit that they&
128.
by pjscott 3y ago
Even a "polluted beyond help" Earth would be easier to live on than Mars. We have liquid water, a nice thick atmosphere that isn't 95% carbon dioxide, a better ionosphere, easy access to nitrogen as a synthetic fertilizer fee
129.
by pjscott 3y ago
Evolution didn't understand a darn thing, and yet it created us.
130.
by pjscott 4y ago
Oh, that actually sounds really convenient. Next time I'm scaling a recipe by a factor other than 2, I'll get out the slide rule and enjoy the incredulous looks from everybody nearby. I can hardly wait!
131.
by pjscott 4y ago
That's put there by Substack, not the author. (And of course the blog post would fall under copyright even without it.)
132.
by pjscott 4y ago
Bless you. I appreciate this, and my mother who has some neurological issues related to auditory processing definitely appreciates it.
133.
by pjscott 4y ago
It's not heavy water. It's very slightly tritiated water, and the tritium concentration is low enough that you could drink it without worry.
134.
by pjscott 4y ago
That's from the book "Discrimination and Disparities".
135.
by pjscott 4y ago
Yes, that's exactly the historical rationale for the adoption of the SAT. It gained popularity in the first half of the 20th century as an attempt to identify poor kids with academic potential, so they could get educational opportuni
136.
by pjscott 4y ago
I remember taking the SAT and ACT, and didn't notice any multiple-choice question which didn't have exactly one right answer and three unambiguously wrong answers. They put actual effort into making sure this is the case.
137.
by pjscott 4y ago
In the case of Iowa specifically , the trick (if you can handle the coursework) is to go to Iowa State and major in engineering. They're reasonably affordable and surprisingly high-tier. Quite a few other flyover states that you would
138.
by pjscott 4y ago
Yes, the whole field has pretty much fallen to the replication crisis. The thing this article is complaining about is that "Science" magazine apparently has a section in which it uncritically repeats politically-fashionable junk s
139.
by pjscott 4y ago
There's a market for getting underqualified students into fancy universities via legalized semi-bribery, but it would be bad for their image if they openly admitted to it. Hence the obfuscation.
140.
by pjscott 4y ago
If you put the money mostly into bonds or stocks that don't issue significant dividends, you'll pretty much just have to worry about capital gains (form 1099-B), and those aren't taxed until the fiscal year in which they&#x27
141.
by pjscott 4y ago
Deming had some genuinely counterintuitive stuff to say. The focus on reducing variance was obvious in retrospect, once you do the math, but important at the time.
142.
by pjscott 4y ago
I'm curious how you explain Japan. Their traditional religions have never been very big on moral instruction, certainly not the way Christianity is, and today a supermajority of the population doesn't take religion seriously at al
143.
by pjscott 4y ago
I'm not sure how size of government is supposed to affect "expectations on behavior, cultural output, language use, dress, or anything else". Do European countries have Bureaus of Politeness and Decorum that send civil servan
144.
by pjscott 4y ago
Alright, I'll moderate my argument a bit by acknowledging that I'd have to use both hands to count the number of places that ABC reported as having newsworthy municipal water problems. But that's roughly what I'd expect
145.
by pjscott 4y ago
Also recommended is this remarkably clear explanation of the mechanisms at work here, and how things could in theory be much better: https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/
146.
by pjscott 4y ago
In those decades most consumer goods have become cheaper (adjusted for inflation), but we've seen drastic increases in the cost of housing, medicine, education, and infrastructure. Those are big money pits. As for why this happened,
147.
by pjscott 4y ago
It's worth noting that, in a country of 330 million people, you only came up with two examples. Those things are newsworthy because they're outliers .
148.
by pjscott 4y ago
MacOS has a system for adjusting process priority based on what the user is doing. Whatever program is in the foreground is high-priority, and any programs that it calls with blocking mach-port-based IPC are temporarily promoted to the same
149.
by pjscott 4y ago
Sounds like a combination of (a) panic-buying of commodities that people heard were in short supply, similar to the Great Toilet Paper Incident, and (b) local government that doesn't do anything about homeless encampments in mall parki
150.
by pjscott 4y ago
Bananas are a photogenic edge case, not a staple food. Far more representative of America's food-wealth are grains and meat -- which it produces in enormous amounts, and exports to the rest of the world. That doesn't happen by exp

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