We had this (thankfully an optional addition to physical keys) at one of my previous buildings. The failure rate was maybe 2% but still way too high to trust for regular use.
The locks also ran on batteries, which a technician came out multiple times in the ~year I lived there to replace. Overall was a nice add-on to the physical key for e.g. guest access but the economics of these things given the battery replacement seems dubious. If it ain't broke...
Airbnb vs. hotels is like Mom and Pop restaurants vs. fast food to me. You might have a better experience at the former, but you know exactly what you're going to get at the latter.
My last Airbnb went perfectly smoothy but there was still a ton of communication with the host. And that was only part of a dozen+ emails and a similar number of app notifications related to the stay. Why? At some point I just want to show up, crash, and leave.
Note that the Forbes list doesn't necessarily reflect how people are getting rich at the moment, but how people in the more recent past have gotten rich. The catalyzing events that launch the fortunes of the wealthiest were already happening a while ago
RobinHood has served the purpose of getting the other "real" brokerages to eliminate fees on trades. Now that they're not the only discount show in town, and given their track record of anti-user behavior, it's past time to move on
It seems that both numbers are from the same report. Here's an excerpt from the report:
> How is it that only 12 states have adult obesity rates exceeding 35 percent, yet the national obesity rate is 42.4 percent? It’s because state obesity rates are from the BRFSS, which collects self-reported height and weight. Research has demonstrated that people tend to overestimate their height and underestimate their weight. In fact, one study found that, due to this phenomenon, the BRFSS may underestimate obesity rates by nearly 10 percent. NHANES, from which the national obesity rate is derived, calculates its obesity rate based on measurements obtained at respondents’ physical examinations. Accordingly, the higher rates found by NHANES are a more accurate reflection of obesity in the United States.
I think it was Dan Carlin who suggested it might be a good idea to (every decade or so) conduct a live nuclear test above ground and publicize it widely. Not to make sure the bomb worked - but to remind everyone of the destructive power of these devices
It sounds like a good idea, but I think it'll backfire. You'd think that would make people want less nukes, but ultimately, it would make people want more nukes to protect themselves from others with nukes.
After hiroshima and nagasaki, the soviet union, britain, france, china, etc didn't say, "wow that's destructive, lets have less of that". They said, "wow that's destructive" and "we need some".
I think if we did that openly and showed the world the destructive power of nukes every decade, more and more nations would want to get it and we'd have more nuclear powers.
The same Dan Carlin mentioned above also pointed out how for the brief period where the USA had the bomb and the USSR did not we bossed them around by threatening to bomb them.
Yes somewhat harmful to the environment but not as harmful to the environment as a nuclear war.
I feel we as a species need to get better at weighing up the costs of our action or inaction, making hard choices rather than everyone just fighting blindly for one half of the equation. /rant
Unfortunately, we've set up all our systems - governance, markets - to work through fighting. Politics, business and negotiations all work the same way: every side fights for their immediate short-term interest. One team wins this battle, other team wins that battle, and it goes on and on, until the cost of fighting outweighs any marginal improvement any side could get - and a "compromise" is reached.
I think it all comes down to the fact that we don't trust each other at scale. Because I can't trust that you'll approach searching for solutions honestly, that you'll optimize globally, I have to fight for my own interest at expense of rationality. For the same reason, you end up fighting for yours.
It's ridiculously wasteful, and I think most of humanity's problems stem from it. I can't think of a way out of it, at scale.
The general rule of thumb is that the radiation in the fallout from a bomb goes down by a factor of 10 for every factor of 7 the time since the detonation increases. So it's 10 times less radioactive after a week as it was after a day. 100 times after a month and a half, 1000 times less after a year, etc.
Under the linear-no-threshold dose model we'd expect several death from fallout induced cancer per test. But on the other hand we know that the linear-no-threshold model is false. If you give some fruit flies a 50 REM dose of xrays all at once they get cancer. If you give them 50 REMs spread out over the course of a month they don't. But we don't really know what the actual model is very well so that's not a risk I'd be happy to take.
Bombs can be "tuned" to burn nearly all or very little of their fissable material. Radiation from the blast dissipiates nearly immediately, but the bomb would need to be designed to provide little fallout(it's doable is what I'm trying to say).
Amount of fallout depends on more things, not just settings of the bomb. Mainly on where the bomb detonates. If close to ground/water, then it's bad, lots of fallout. If in stratosphere, very little fallout.
If you burn less, you lower the yield. Burning more means you turn more mildly-radioactive plutonium or U235 into intensely radioactive fission products. Strontium-90, for example, accumulates in bones and has a half-life of 28 years.
Normalising nuclear testing is a terrible idea! This is simply seen by unpacking the blandly neutral statement "nuclear testing" to the more accurate "practice mass murder by use of large explosion using a complicated device".
I don't see how normalizing or not normalizing it will have any effect whatsoever on its proliferation. No country acquires nuclear weapons to actually use them. Instead, it is (rightly) viewed as a great deterrent/insurance against being invaded and overrun.
During the cold war, it was much debated whether 'limited nuclear war' was possible - for example, if Soviet tanks entered France and France used only small nuclear shells, only those smaller than a large conventional munition, only against military targets and only within their own borders; would that inevitably trigger an escalation to mutually assured destruction or not?
People who thought it would be tremendously convenient [0] if limited nuclear war was possible generally wanted to remove the taboo between large conventional explosions and small nuclear explosions, and so would support programs like the US "Project Plowshare" [1] and the Soviet "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy" [2] which used nuclear weapons for mining and civil engineering.
With that said, one might very well argue that we are no longer in the cold war, and that our policies no longer need to be guided by the prospect of Soviet tanks entering France. And whether a once-per-decade reminder explosion would erode or enhance the taboo against their use in war.
Also this use would likely not be against the invading forces themselves because you'd be contaminating your own land so the use of nukes as protection against conquest requires not only the willingness to use them first but to use them on your enemy's homeland, likely military industrial targets which will also hit civilians.
That's immaterial, because your potential adversary isn't going to want to find out what your nuclear rules of engagement really are. Possessing nuclear weapons raises the threshold for putting the invasion on the table quite dramatically. And if there is a war, nuclear weapons limit its scope quite quickly.
Just think of how many Indian and Pakistani lives have been saved because the two countries stepped back when shit was about to get real. Like, three times now. All because of nukes. Unless one of them truly commits to invading and losing millions of lives, their wars are guaranteed to peter out as border skirmishes.
Ok this is bad but maybe shitty customer service and slow processes are the price of a functioning financial system. Say what you will about the dated technology and opaque processes - legacy big banks work, your money is safe there, and there has not been a significant, system-wide technology error.
Not that things should never change - pieces of this puzzle should be replaced, but very carefully. A major technology exploit or bug at a major bank would be apocalyptically bad. The stakes are too high to rapidly entrust financial infrastructure to whichever fintech startup comes knocking. Consider the recent case of Robinhood, a big-leaguer as far as fintechs go, accidentally offering infinite leverage. This was enough to convince me not to want fintechs near the bones of the banking system for quite some time.
If divination by bird augury is so wise, why don't we still use that to plan agricultural layouts?
/s
But that sort of underscores the main argument against this stuff. Is it possible that many traditions, while once adaptive and beneficial, are no longer so? In other words, has the human situation departed so significantly from ancestral conditions that much of tradition is somewhere between irrelevant and harmful?
Of course not all tradition should be thrown out just for being old. But the tools of rationality have come a long way.
That’s the open question, isn’t it? We don’t know what we don’t know, so no matter how elaborate a rational defense of reform is, the reality may always be one step more complex than we thought.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t reform, but that reformers should be more humble than they are today, where many simply assume that the reasoned argument is the better one because of the superior nature of reason.
“The first important principle of science is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool” — Richard Feynman
The challenge is that rationality is often useless approach in complex systems.
If I might be a little provocative, even “truth” and “facts” might be ill-defined concepts in complex systems (how will you establish controls? How big a sample must you run randomizes controlled trials on? What if that’s much bigger than feasible/possible due to exponential scaling? Not possible even in principle!)
A fundamental problem is the human tendency to try and optimize outcomes (using available rationality) — because we invariably overfit to temporary/local optima at the cost of the long term. To counter this failure mode requires sacrificing optimality (always defined by a proxy metric which holds only temporarily) for plurality/diversity. It is understood/expected that this deep principle has numerous manifestations in biology and culture (eg: sexual reproduction, enforced pseudo randomness, etc).
There is another “meta rational” idea that to understand things and do science, you have to first “survive”. Science only gives a reasonable guarantee of eventual correctness. Nobody guarantees that it is the best guide to live your (finite) life by. In Newton’s times, theology and alchemy were considered as promising (if not more) than physics (natural philosophy). George Washington’s doctors recommended blood-letting (SOTA medical technology of the day). What will humans two hundred years from now say about our current views?
The most important principle is to iteratively take insured risks and keep learning. If you hang around long enough doing that, knowledge will accumulate and compound.
You have to be careful with such an argumentation. It may very well be that forbidding pork is the result of century-long observations that people who eat much pork will on average die earlier than the general population. It may even be that the only kinds of meat eaten in the culture that originally invented this rule were fish, chicken and pork, which would mean that forbidding pork was equal to the modern damnation of "red meat".
Arguments like "pigs are unclean and live in the dirt" may have been used to explain this effect and to rationalize the rule, but just because the rationalization of a rule has been proven incorrect, its original intention is not automatically wrong.
The prohibition of pork has nothing to do with disease. We’ve rationalized it by telling ourselves, since there is no God that could make such a silly request, that maybe they did it to cement food safety. Theres as much evidence that it’s all just a fortuitous coincidence.
If you think long and hard enough you can come up with a rationalization for anything in the Torah (or anything, really).
Instead religion is to be enjoyed like Love is. You don’t talk about pheromones and dopamine levels when you embrace you wife. You talk about mountains, and blue skies, and soaring views. If, on a whim, your wife were to ask you to pretend you’re a hare, would you not entertain her?
If you’re a Christian you could rationalize the pork thing by saying: “the purpose of the prohibition was to set up a teaching moment for Peter about Universalism and humility 1000 years later”.
But that’s silly. Instead, for a believer, it’s a insignificant request for an opportunity to make a physical demonstration of Love to the Devine.
The Sufis aren’t dancing because they’re free of tape worms.
This is getting back to metis and episteme. I liked how this concept was explored in the Uruk Machine series if you want to read more.
Metis is "local accumulated knowledge" and episteme is "abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge".
Metis, tradition, is barely knowledge. It is more of a practice without any of the justification needed for knowledge. So if your community knows that it is best to plant seeds during a specific holiday, they might think a supernatural blessing is the reason. Knowing something for the wrong reason isn't knowledge.
Non-knowledge loses arguments to knowledge. When an agricultural scientist comes with theories and results it won't be difficult to say that the farming community actually doesn't know anything. That's fine. But we are too quick to throw out tradition vs knowledge because unless it is specifically measured against it, the practice of tradition may be superior to the practice of current knowledge. Their traditional planting date may be superior to all models. After all, they've successfully farmed here centuries or millennia.
The Sufis might be dancing because having community gatherings allows communities to survive. The dancing and rationalization is incidental but the actual gathering is a crucial matter of survival.
You’re arguing with a straw man. I think he’s mostly saying that tradition sometimes contains valuable knowledge even if those practicing it can’t explain it. That’s not saying all traditions must be conserved at all.
the article clearly explains that they mainly consist of making up rational and plausible sounding reasons, a disease especially virulent in modern western society
Most of the irrelevant and harmful stuff was stripped away long ago when it stopped being useful. Most tradition is useful, although the industrial revolution has been cause for reevaluating many, many traditions; even millennia old traditions like (some of the more egregious) gender roles.
Fair enough. The system is statistical; I’m not claiming every harmful tradition is eliminated and tradition is optimal; only that the most harmful traditions are eliminated or minimized (e.g., human sacrifice is only practiced among very primitive civilizations).
the lack of bird divination could partly explain why modern agriculture is so devastating to the environment, specifically the soil.
perhaps over time we will wipe ourselves out and only bird augury using farming communities will survive the test of time
Nobody argues that "all tradition is wrong." That would be silly. Obviously the processes of traditional and cultural evolution are going to produce many things that work.
Those who argue the "traditionalist" side are typically arguing much more than that. They're arguing that tradition should count alone as a form of evidence or proof.
There's a funny thing about that. I never see these types of arguments made for traditions that are neutral and innocuous, like the curious custom of decorating trees indoors in winter, or those that are obviously valid and beneficial. I only see it trotted out in support of traditions that are hard to defend without tortured arguments and special pleading.
From what I've seen over the past 5-10 years the latter are generally prejudices and caste systems under attack in liberal democracies.
Personally I take the position that if you're going to argue that some category of human being is less valuable or should have less rights than everyone else you'd better have a damn strong argument that goes way beyond "it's traditional."
I'm not necessarily insinuating anything about the author, but even if the author didn't intend to construct a rationale for a caste system that's usually where this goes. The reason is as I said above: only otherwise indefensible traditions require special pleading, so any such special pleading furnished tends to gravitate toward its market niche.
>I never see these types of arguments made for traditions that are neutral and innocuous, like the curious custom of decorating trees indoors in winter, or those that are obviously valid and beneficial.
I expect this has more to do with the fact that such things don't often need to be defended because they are either neutral and innocuous or obviously valid and beneficial.
Surely you've heard people defend 'merry christmas' vs 'happy holidays' with this reasoning, and unless I'm vastly underestimating the offense felt by being told to be happy for the wrong cultural celebration, that is not a serious issue of prejudice. The argument is made because the thing is threatened, not because the thing is bad.
Outside political talk radio I haven't heard people claim "Merry Christmas" is under serious threat. I live in a pretty liberal and very multicultural place and heard and saw plenty of "Merry Christmas" this season. Even non-Christians seem to call the ubiquitous decorated pine a "Christmas tree." Nobody seems offended. (You can always find someone who is terribly offended about anything, but it's definitely not a broadly held sentiment.)
Most retailers and the media opt for "Happy Holidays" for simple marketing reasons: their audience is broad and they don't want to seem uninviting to Jews, Muslims, atheists, etc. A mall isn't going to print "(Merry|Happy|Blessed) (Christmas|Hanukkah|Ramadan|Solstice|...)"
I do sometimes see tradition's value highlighted to attempt to rescue fading traditions from being forgotten or eclipsed by modern noise and consumerism. These traditions might not be harmful in any way and there's nothing wrong with trying to preserve them. When this is done, it tends to face little to no opposition. No extraordinary arguments are needed, just drawing attention to the tradition and its moral, historic, community, or aesthetic value.
My point was to highlight something I've personally observed, especially in these (HN and its orbits) circles: when more ideological traditionalist arguments surface they inevitably end up leading in certain directions. I've seen this movie before.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "All employees"
So I'll hazard a guess about a change in what part of those mining and logging industries hired: less manual workers and more office ones as they get consolidated into bigger conglomerates. But I may be wrong.
Assuming a 25 year career, you replace 4% of the workforce every year, so just hiring an even number of females would be more than that. (I don't know what the retirement age is for loggers, I'd guess younger than 65 based on it being a union physical labor job)
It's not really about the leverage on its own. As Levine points out in his take on it [1], it's about finding ways to "hack the system". And, in no small part, entertain the merry band of fools at r/walllstreetbets
The locks also ran on batteries, which a technician came out multiple times in the ~year I lived there to replace. Overall was a nice add-on to the physical key for e.g. guest access but the economics of these things given the battery replacement seems dubious. If it ain't broke...