www.google.com

Yeah I think this is pretty reasonable. If parents set their kids up on adult accounts that’s on them.

I have a bunch. I think the biggest one is that some people are naturally dumber than other people and can’t be fixed by education. I don’t think this broadly applies to any specific ethnic group or anything, but I do think that there is likely a genetic component to intelligence. I also don’t think that we should prevent these people from breeding or treat them as inferior, but I also think that sending these people to college is a waste of time and expecting them to do well on college either waters down the college education experience or puts unfair expectations on them. I worry a lot about how these people will fare in an increasingly automated world and the answer is not good at all.

I am skeptical of the premise that long chain hydrocarbons can only be explained by life. Mostly because that logic fails whe examining how life arose on Earth in the first place. If complex organic molecules can only form life, then how did life arise on Earth to begin with? Life itself is complex organic chemistry and large organic molecules. If complex molecules like polypeptides and RNA can’t form without life, then life can’t come into being in the first place. Particularly with these long chain hydrocarbons it’s not that hard to imagine exotic conditions where they might be able to form. It is certainly easier to imagine these conditions than imagining the self replicating RNA or polypeptide strands that most likely became life as we know it. If they had found chains of nucleic acids or amino acids I would be a lot more willing to buy that it’s a sign of life. But hydrocarbons? It’s definitely interesting and a very good thing to look into (particularly in terms of the origins of life) but it’s far from a smoking gun.

That said, I am very interested in this finding because, at the end of the day, I do think it is relevant to biochemistry. Mostly that there are two possible explanations and both are important. If it’s not proof of life on Mars (I don’t think it is), then it is proof that complex organic molecules have formed elsewhere in relatively normal chemical conditions in the universe without existing organisms, which is a major unsolved problem in trying to determine the origin of life.

I am an engineer and it’s just legitimately hard to build any kind of sensor that lasts and stays accurate longer than like 10 years especially without maintenance. They do intentionally design them so that they don’t last longer, but that’s because a design that would last longer would costs like 10x as much and require a lot of maintenance and calibration that your average homeowner is simply not going to do. It’s honestly surprising you can make an accurate smoke detector that even lasts 10 years as cheap as they are.

This is why I just go ahead and buy the new ones that come with batteries that last 10 years. You’ll have to replace the whole unit when they die anyway.

Water is wet, research finds.

You’re trying to make a weird semantic distinction that doesn’t really accomplish anything. Unskilled labor doesn’t mean undignified or unworthy of respect, it is just a description of a certain kind of work with essentially no barrier to entry. Again it’s very uncommon in modern advanced economies but in the past (and today in some very poor areas) you’d have people whose job it was to push millstones around in a circle all day, a job that is also done by literal donkeys. That is not skilled labor.

Bro there were people back in the day who would just push a heavy millstone around in a circle, a job that was often also done by literal donkeys. It’s hard to imagine in a modern economy, where truly unskilled labor is rare, but it exists. We often forget how much is done by machines that was done by laborers in the past or still is in poorer countries.

It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can’t move yourself. It’s not that you can’t be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure it out very quickly.

These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional “unskilled labor” required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.

Eh. There are definitely jobs that you can grab random guys off the street for and they will be okay enough at them to get started right away or will be able to be trained to do them in an afternoon. Think of any time you’ve done a volunteering project - you don’t get any specialized training to do this type of work, but you can go ahead and get started with maybe like a short explanation of how it works. Sure you won’t be as good as a pro, but you could get up to speed quite quickly if it was all you were doing. These types of jobs are becoming less and less common as they get automated, but they do still exist. That is what is meant by “unskilled labor.” It’s not a dig at the people who do these types of jobs, but rather that you don’t need specialized training to do them.

I’ve read the synopsis of this book and the ones in this book don’t either

I think there’s a valid concern here. When fake meat technology inevitably becomes cheaper than real meat, companies will definitely try passing off fake meat as real meat or try to thin out real meat with fake meat, and will definitely try to be deceptive about it. However, I think the solution is to allow the terms sausage and burger, but require very clear labeling like requiring the term “plant-based” or “partially plant based” to be on the packaging in the same font size as the term “sausage” or “burger” if there is more than 20% plant matter included (number based on existing EU regulations for sausages). That said, IDK if this would fully stop it. In the US it would just have as little description as possible with “[Brand Name] Links” or “[Brand Name] Patties” if they weren’t allowed to say sausage or burger.

If nothing else I feel like more people would be killed with Shinzo Abe guns and similar hardware store contraptions

I wish it were for political reasons but honestly the main reason for me is that reddit just sucks now. It’s way too sterile and predictable.

This reminds me of a hilarious side quest in The Witcher 3 where a wizard gets locked out of his tower because he didn’t know it was equipped with a Defensive Regulatory Magicon (DRM) when he bought it and the only way to fix it is with Gottfried’s Omni-opening Grimoire (GOG). GOG is the game store started by CD Projekt to sell DRM free copies of old games.

Welp that sucks time to find a new platform

I’ll go against the grain and say literally all of it. Every piece of technology that exists is a compromise between what the designer wants to do and the constraints of what is practical or possible to actually pull off. Therefore, all technology “fails” on at least some metric the designer would like it to achieve. Technology is all about improvement and working with imperfection. If we don’t keep trying to make things better, then innovation stops. With your example of VR, I’d say that after having seen multiple versions of VR in my lifetime, the one that we have now is way more successful and impactful, especially in commercial uses rather than consumer products. Engineers can now tour facilities before they are built with VR headsets to see design flaws that they might not have seen just with a traditional model review, for example. Furthermore, what we have now is just an iteration on what we had before. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, people take what came before, look at what worked and what didn’t, and what could be fixed with other technologies that have developed in the meantime. That’s the iteration process.

Right but it literally doesn’t work on my system and I literally can’t make it work by design. It’s not a matter of liking “tweaking my system” it literally doesn’t work at all.

Nah it was pretty easy to update the drivers. I had to look up a guide but compared to updating windows it was nothing.