Viewing profile — Mbioguy

History may not repeat but it does rhyme. Harappan civ thought to have declined due to less water. Petra once thrived due to a system of dams, cisterns, and water conduits, but nev…

Note: if you want a meaningful discussion about physician salaries, you need to be discussing lifetime income after tax and after debt repayment, and compare this metric to other p…

Wow, lots to unpack here. First off, MAs are not remotely comparable to PAs or physicians. MAs typically earn a certificate, and salary is 20-30k. They are typically office or cler…

Azores, Canary Islands, Madeira

You've got it backwards. This has nothing to do with mandatory reporting laws. You are assuming something is said about person B during person A's confessional. That isn't what is …

You're being disingenuous and attempting to deflect from real issues. It's not only the text of the honor code that matters, but also the social context and how it is applied. If y…

This article falls prey to a myopic view of capitalist vs communist 'econ'. The reality is that the 19th and early 20th centuries were abuzz with economic tinkering and innovation.…

Boy are you in for a surprise. Medical school lectures are mostly optional these days and are entirely skipped by a significant proportion of med students in favor of resources lik…

Nothing in evolution is inevitable. Granted some things are more likely (oxygen-binding hemoglobin has independently evolved several times from its related non-binding globin famil…

This. I'm gonna cut to the chase: that line is probably the most fascist thing I'm going to read all day, and excepting you, Hacker News has failed to call it out. This idea that w…

Utilities are natural monopolies. Not exactly the best fit for a market solution, especially when, as in this case, they are negative externalities borne by the public that the com…

Yes, it's impossible to convince a large number of people to switch, which perfectly explains why Maine is still using FPtP despite the large push for RCV a few years ago. /s Proof…

I like Approval voting for single positions that are supposed to represent a community rather than a faction: mayor, governor, county commissioner, etc. Mixed member for legislativ…

"They thoughtlessly order tests and thoughtlessly obey the results." Hacker News, come on. You're better than this. Taking it from the top: The obvious take is that the new tools t…

Counterpoint I posted in r/askscience last year: https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7kq5r4/what_det...

For those of us who want to switch to alternate electoral methods like RCV, approval voting, multimember districting, etc, using machine counting is a big deal. If you are paper on…

Infectious etiology is not the same as being contagious. We know HPV causes increased cancer risk, but we don't treat folks with those cancers as contagious. They're not. But their…

Paper ballots are not the obstacle. (I like paper ballots with optical scanning, as in my main post.) The obstacle is that there are some who want there to be no machine involvemen…

I was part of a now-tabled push for RCV in a red state a few years back. While it offered a solution to several issues and had some multiparty support, the big problem arose when t…

Doesn't going paper-only make it difficult to switch to alternative voting systems like RCV (as Maine is) or multiple-member districting at anything beyond a local level? FPTP is f…

A deeply red/Republican and relatively low-density state might seem like a strange place to find a functional public transit system. Utah is an interesting place. The geography of …

Few people have tried Anki (a free alternative to SuperMemo). Even fewer have tried its add-ons, which is where it truly shines! Vanilla Anki is mostly good for text flashcarding, …

Snowplow parenting too.

10% is a very big deal. We talk about trying to 'eat healthy', but what happens when all your food is becoming less healthy? This is a tragedy of a worldwide commons. Because it's …