Typically it does flow better, but I have a little mental stumble every time someone uses “woman” or “women” as an adjective. I know why they’re doing it and I can’t really fault them, it just… feels off.
Typically it does flow better, but I have a little mental stumble every time someone uses “woman” or “women” as an adjective. I know why they’re doing it and I can’t really fault them, it just… feels off.
Yes, but it is a problem. It’s a problem that has no partisan component, which can be fixed without political grandstanding. It’s also a problem which kills people: the 6% increase in car crashes it causes is a lot of easily preventable deaths.
If you can’t come into work because your tires are slashed, you should not be fired.
…really? The post was clearly a joke, and if it had any stance at all it was the celebration of modern medicine.
I tried to install Linux on my new laptop, trying multiple different distros.
In short, driver problems. So many driver problems. I was sinking too much time into it, and I was basically unable to use my computer. So I gave up and switched back to Windows. Windows has its own annoyances, and I want to use Linux… but Windows mostly works, most of the time. Linux doesn’t, and I have neither the time nor the technical skills to make it work.
Skimping on security seems really stupid right now. There are probably a fair few Canadians who would like to do certain MPs harm… not to mention India has been doing political assassinations.
I’m lucky, in a sense, that I don’t have to make this decision. The only viable candidates in my riding are the Conservatives and the NDP, so I can actually vote my conscience.
(assuming the time traveller cooperates)
Then it depends on whether the future is mutable, or if we’re forced into stable time loops. If time is stable, I’d get some friends. I would never speak to the time traveller directly, but I would text back-and-forth with my friends as they talk to the time traveller. When 3 hours are up, the traveller goes back in time to talk to a different friend in the same three-hour window. (If they’re tired, they can travel back 12 hours and catch some sleep before the next meeting.) It would be an interestingly acausal conversation, but Objective 1 would be finding a more permanent way to bypass the three-hour limit, maybe setting up an AI that will ask good questions of the time traveller. (If they can bring a USB stick with some good AI on it, for instance). We’d also want the future version of Wikipedia, and detailed plans for whatever useful technology gets invented in the future. As well as enough almanac knowledge to get seed money for a future-tech company, and useful news items. I wouldn’t ask about mounting crises like global warming, though, so that my company can do something about it – if I base my actions on knowledge of the future, the future is set. I think.
If the future is truly mutable, though, I just resolve to send a detailed summary of our conversation back in time to a week before I schedule the traveller to come. I get a conversation summary, use it to make the conversation more productive, and then send the new summary back. Repeat until I can take over the world, build a time machine, send a large expedition back to 12,000 BC to do an industrial revolution, and then send an even larger expedition back to the early Universe. When entropy starts to become annoying, go another century before the previous expedition and just accept them as citizens. Repeat until godhood achieved.
3 hours from whose perspective? Time limits are rather complicated when you have time travel.
Wesnoth’s very fun too!
That’s not how statistics works. You can have a significant effect with a tiny effect size, or a large effect size that on analysis turns out to be insignificant.
How so? The study showed no consistent association between funding and crime rates. That is true verbatim.
If there’s no zero in the dataset, then we don’t have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.
It specifies who the protester was. If it was a Yellow Vest, they would have said that.
Small comfort to the reporter who got beaten up or SWATted or stalked, or the news organization that gets vandalized or DDoSed. If you’re more likely to visit violence on your critics, people are less likely to criticize you. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s true.
Right-wingers are more likely to beat you up. Changes the calculus for photographers.
In terms of the trust problem, one easy way to solve it would be to just require real names. Instance admins (maybe also moderators) must post an address, a name, and a (redacted) ID. A registered corporation would also work. Then, they would provide escrow, taking the payment but only giving it to the seller once receipt has been confirmed. The concern would be fraud on the part of the purchaser. There’s no foolproof way to fix that, but if both buyers and sellers have “reputation” scores it would be pretty easy to tell if someone’s lying.
The admin could also skim 1-2% off every transaction, and then put that into a fund to pay buyers in the case of complaints. That way both the seller and buyer are satisfied, and reputation scores can be used to boot probable fraudsters.
Either way, the system would also allow buyers and sellers to arrange payment in-person, in which case there would be no guarantee needed and the admin wouldn’t take a cut.
This system centralizes power in a small number of people who can be sued. Everyone else stays anonymous, and if they’re bad actors the admins deal with them. If an admin is a bad actor, their name and address is posted publicly for the world to see. Obvious problem here is that fewer people would want to be admins, but maybe it would be possible to set up a corporate structure where the owner’s identity is revealed only if they’re being sued – I’m not a lawyer and you’d have to talk to one. Maybe there could also be a way for them to post records of every transaction in a verifiable yet anonymous fashion, to prove they aren’t skimming anything off the top (beyond whatever they say they’re taking for server fees).
We can have perfectly secure online voting, if you’re willing for all votes to be public. Or we can have perfectly secure and anonymous voting, if you’re okay with some secret master list. There are very smart people working on cryptographic voting protocols and I think I would love to live in an online-voting-based direct democracy, but as it stands we don’t know how to set that system up.
Maybe we could make publicly known votes work. Athens did it, the early US did it. But there are problems with both intimidation and incentivization, and we’d need some sort of framework to prevent that.
We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.
That’s not how exploitation works, not really. The rich will exploit as much as they can. Prices are already set to maximize profit. The rich can’t pass higher prices along, because if they could charge more, they already would. Cutting taxes on big companies doesn’t create jobs or lower prices – and raising taxes won’t destroy jobs or raise prices.