larnmar

5 ms·

1.
by larnmar 7y ago
You could well be right, maybe Iran’s air defences are on a par with Syria’s. I’ve suddenly realised something important — I’m commenting on important issues based on nothing but information gleaned from probably equally ignorant comments p
2.
by larnmar 7y ago
If casualties are zero, we can laugh it off as an impotent hissy fit by an incompetent adversary. If casualties are non-zero, the President will be obliged to carry out his “52 targets” threat. This is probably the right move — don’t play t
3.
by larnmar 7y ago
As always, thinking about flat Earthism is a terrible exercise for your brain. The fact that a few people exist who are utterly and obviously wrong about something, and that you’re not among them, should not encourage you to think that you’
4.
by larnmar 7y ago
Counteranecdote: I made a fake account for work purposes (needed to look at certain things on Facebook that you can only see while logged in, and didn’t want to use my personal account) and it got deleted pretty quickly.
5.
by larnmar 7y ago
Is anyone aware of any compelling evidence that these fires were meaningfully worsened by climate change?
6.
by larnmar 7y ago
Pretty easy to get the “consent of the governed” when you kill anyone who comes close to expressing dissent.
7.
by larnmar 7y ago
I’m guessing you’re not an Uyghur?
8.
by larnmar 7y ago
Bushfires haven’t got any worse over the decades, but the writing about them sure as shit has.
9.
by larnmar 7y ago
Sure, in the same way that trying to build a ladder to the moon might eventually lead to inventing rocketry.
10.
by larnmar 7y ago
Money terrible spent, just another billion poured down the drain on inefficient renewable energy technologies that would have been much better spent developing better technologies. For a billion dollars you could hire five hundred brilliant
11.
by larnmar 7y ago
If people choose to give their money to others, then that’s fine. The problem with society is that it is taken from us against our will.
12.
by larnmar 7y ago
What’s really odd is that this is an article at all. In a world where billions of things happen every day, how does a garden-variety franchisee contract dispute in Japan become an article in the New York Times?
13.
by larnmar 7y ago
Yes, which gives you an idea of what the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are like.
14.
by larnmar 7y ago
I would say there’s no evidence whatsoever which would tell us whether CA was more or less effective than any other agency might have been.
15.
by larnmar 7y ago
Investment idea: build a bunch of projectors that fool orbiting satellites into reading empty parking lots as full, then short retailers’ stocks at earnings time, knowing that all the big smart money will be on the other side.
16.
by larnmar 7y ago
If this were really true, you’d expect to see most people with full freedom to set their own hours gravitate towards that 30-hour mark. Professors working 30-hour weeks would write more papers than their harder-working colleagues. Business
17.
by larnmar 7y ago
As a pretty good estimate, roughly zero? Do you have any proposed mechanism for how Australia’s coal production would lead to increased property losses, aside from the very marginal effect of Australia’s coal production on global warming mu
18.
by larnmar 7y ago
My solution: “Thanks for posting your review on goodreads! As a final step, please enter the fourth word on page 93 of the book you’ve just reviewed”
19.
by larnmar 7y ago
Personally, I buy the big brand name drugs over generics for the somewhat-rational reason that I trust the quality control and deep pockets of a Johnson and Johnson or GlaxoSmithKline more than I trust whatever random company makes those ge
20.
by larnmar 7y ago
I still remain unconvinced that was really “Russia” (as opposed to, say, some bored Russian teens). The reason for my skepticism is the crappy podunk nature of the leaked material. The FSB spends billions every year spying on US politicians
21.
by larnmar 7y ago
Since having kids I’ve been realising that a lot of the things in life that other people do, that have never made sense to me, suddenly make a whole lot more sense in the context of kids. With a kid, I’m suddenly super grateful for my lit
22.
by larnmar 7y ago
Lawns are aesthetically pleasing to humans. It has been widely observed that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah, have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat. Regents Park, or you
23.
by larnmar 7y ago
Personally, I feel safer knowing that all my embarrassing personal data is at Google, along with everyone else’s, rather than somewhere else. I’m confident that Google can’t do anything genuinely shitty with my data without also pissing off
24.
by larnmar 7y ago
Borges once wrote something about his father’s library. As a boy, his father told him that he was allowed to read anything he wanted from his vast library, on one condition: that if he found himself reading something he wasn’t interested in
25.
by larnmar 7y ago
I wish people would stop using the word “simple” to describe problems like massively realigning all the incentives in a huge decentralised system against the wishes of the existing power-holders in that system. That’s not simple, it’s proba
26.
by larnmar 7y ago
Isn’t a brief glance at the shape of some congressional districts a smoking gun that it happens all the damn time?
27.
by larnmar 7y ago
Cynically, the difference is that they don’t own much and other people do. If you’re a 19th century new-money factory owner [ ] looking enviously at all those old-money landed aristocrats it’s easy to see why you’d be able to persuade yours
28.
by larnmar 7y ago
It keeps getting clicks, so they’ll keep writing it every year.
29.
by larnmar 7y ago
So should we tax people based on their political power? A heavily-read blogger might have thousands of times more ability to affect the political landscape than an eccentric billionaire. If you were to do a scatter plot between wealth and a
30.
by larnmar 7y ago
For me as a non-US person, this reads like a spec sheet for “here’s something you should build, because there’s customers waiting”.

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