TangoTrotFox

7 ms·

1.
by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I don't understand why people have to otherize each other. No, again opposition to regulations has nothing to do with some ambiguous opposition to nanny stating in and of itself. That is tangential to the real issue. Before getting t
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Exactly. Large companies love regulations when they affect everybody since they can easily abide the regulations while they help to destroy potential competitors. Keeping regulations focused on big players serves the dual purpose of focusin
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
As one aside on this, the main issue people have with regulations is not regulations in and of themselves, but the negative effect they have on small businesses and competition/entrepreneurship more generally. I think you'd find e
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You're completely correct. I unintentionally implied weightlessness only at the parabolic peak. And I think what you've said is how you should correct things. Words convey ideas. What matters is not the words, but the ideas. Corre
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Police departments have major limitations on manpower and budgets. Setting up sting operations with fake packages, surveillance, and all this stuff is going to be extremely expensive on both accounts. And the ultimate reward is that you jus
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Let's talk about pedantry for a minute. Did you notice the comment I was responding to? It was an individual who thought orbit had something to do with escape velocity. Like many people he probably thought that orbit was about 'es
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I have no idea what's up with HN lately. Your comment is completely correct... and downvoted? This site is starting to become more like Reddit everyday.
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Pretty common misconception, but what you're implying is not how/why you have 0G in space. So for instance the space station still experiences about 90% of Earth's gravity. Orbit is about going really fast, horizontally . If
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
People generally reach grandmaster when they're very young and I'm not restricting my statement to only those that continue to play in international tournaments. One may retire from high level competitive chess, but people rarely
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Chess seems to show the opposite. In particular speak with literally just about any older grandmaster and you'll invariably find their mental faculties are still in great shape. Of course there's always a correlation != causation
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Google facing anti-trust investigations is inevitable at this point. When the hearings and inquiries come, holding onto domain(s) directly connected to the trademarks of would-be competitors is going to be a liability. It might not be unlaw
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
If the drivers are in any way even possibly breaking the law, then the riders could go to the police. If the drivers were acting in a completely lawful, but undesirable, way then the riders could give the drivers a low rating. It is very sa
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
This has also been my experience. I think a meta here is that the vast majority of cab drivers don't, and can't, own their cab. Medallion cabs, for instance, are sold based on bids and have gone for upwards of $2 million and as &q
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
If you look at the history of the world there was an apparent (and counter intuitive) acceleration in the rate at which borders and governments were shifting, largely due to war and revolutions. Then we hit about 1945 and suddenly - it all
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Here's a more reasonable question. If you ask 10,000 random workers from various tech companies if they'd be willing to leave in exchange for more than a year of salary, + benefits, + a bonus. What percent would say yes? We can on
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The article's headline and its content paint different pictures, with the title really just being clickbait. They're not laying off individuals but paying them to leave including upwards of a year of salary, a bonus, and maintaini
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
He's "retired". It was just last month he was competing in a Fischer Random event with many of the top players today. [1] And he still regularly provides commentary, above and beyond that of an informal observer, on various g
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I genuinely and literally also thought I would be unable to function without the medication. This is precisely what I mean by losing context. In just the past few decades the US has seen skyrocketing prescription and use of everything from
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Your doctors are doing the right thing here. After a major surgery I was in rehab and on painkillers for the better part of a year. And when they finally cut the painkillers, it's not like the pain was gone. I thought I was in excrucia
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Tangential to the topic, but your assumption there is very wrong. Due to the politicization of the topic and the media reporting, which is frequently equally sensationalistic and inaccurate, many people are extremely interested in climate c
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
It's difficult to get the precision needed to answer this question, but we have certainly had numerous extremely rapid heating events it the past. These [1] are the ice core data for the past 450k years and there were at least two majo
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You don't have to go anywhere near that far back. Humanity (as in the species of modern humans) has already lived through quite extreme changes in temperatures. These [1] are data from ice core collections over the past 450k years. Som
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Really useful. You've gotta consider how much things change as you get higher into the atmosphere. The obvious thing is that atmospheric oxygen begins to become insufficient to operate engines as you go higher up, so you need engines t
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
A phenomenal movie on the Apollo program and our lead up to is "The Right Stuff" [1]. It's a 1983 film that I only ran into by complete coincidence. It holds up extremely well and is loaded with fun symbolism, real footage, a
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The real answer is quite straight forward. In the end international and governmental actions come down to clout, which in turn comes down to power. The governments with the most power will always do whatever they want to do, and impose thei
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
A problem with this is that 'equal' tends to equate to fields where measuring performance is not really possible in an objective fashion. E.g. - how would you measure business performance? Is Bill Gates a Bobby Fischer of business
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Or not so distant future. There has been a relative standstill in physics in spite of perhaps more 'known unknowns' than ever before. The problem with models independent of 'reality' is a lack of falsifiability. This in
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You can't ignore the gravitational force of the normal mass. The two would rapidly reach a zero-value equilibrium at some point where the repulsive force of the negative mass is perfectly cancelled out by the attractive gravity of the
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The one big gotcha in international finance is the petrodollar. Going back to the 70s we made an incredibly prescient deal with Saudi Arabia. They agree to sell their oil only in USD and then to invest annual surpluses back into US securiti
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by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
That wasn't the point I was making at all. What I was saying is that journalism, in its current state, often runs sensational stories that later end up being false or otherwise unsupported. That report I mentioned was not about the med

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