Viewing profile — analbumcover

Most developed countries have figured this out. Some set amount of parental leave can be used by the parents of the child with the government paying some percentage of their usual …

Snatches and clean and jerks are certainly more technically involved than any movement you'd see in bodybuilding or powerlifting. You train fewer motor patterns with much higher fr…

You are assuming that abilities potentially unique to humans make us, or our progeny, more likely to survive long-term than a randomly selected species. I don't think that is well …

Creating an atmosphere and magnetic field for Mars should be easily doable, although I don't think either is necessary for human life on Mars, by comparison to ensuring our species…

Humans will be long extinct in 500 million years. That's not really something we need be planning for.

They'd be better off reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars since SpaceX is essentially just following the plan he outlined in that book.

> All successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for ke…

This is distinctly at odds with the techno-optimist view that is so prevalent on this site, and in the tech world in general, that expects technology to address societies ills in a…

The point isn't that those institutions have existed for long periods of time, but rather that they attempt to address long-term issues.

Yeah, I didn't expect that to go over well on a distinctly techno-optimist site.

> So is it a coincidence that 99.9% of hunter-gatherer societies have chosen to industrialize? I don't think there is much evidence of this. Would you say that hunter-gatherers in …

The US had, by far, the poorest response to covid of any developed nation. Which is to be expected when the US is only a borderline developed nation.

> I mean, it's succeeded so far. There have been and will be growing pains, but so far the standard of living has increased over time. To declare failure is just speculation. Indus…

> I guess that would make school classes a more fluid concept, where you are with your advanced math friends for 2 hours, then with kids from the average English course for 2 hours…

In the political context obstructionism refers to attempts to delay or otherwise interfere with the legislative process. Which the Democrats may engage in, but I haven't seen any e…

The CARES Act was a compromise, the refusal by the House to enforce subpoenas was a compromise. Even their choice of presidential candidate is a compromise of sorts, see Biden's "n…

Which part? Republican obstructionism or Democratic capitulation?

I'm not sure how long you've been following American politics, but for a few decades now the Democrats have been compromising and capitulating at almost every turn while the Republ…

You make a lot of good points here. What is expected of students in University these days is a joke compared to historical standards. Ironic given the more demanding job market exp…

I would be absolutely flabbergasted if a layman could get through Road to Reality . Even those with an engineering or computer science background would struggle considerably. That …

Ah okay, I guess I didn't realize how different they were. Thanks for the info! I'll be sure to check out that book, it sounds fascinating.

Abstract Algebra by Pinter and Introduction to Topology by Mendelson are two fantastic books, published by Dover, that are too elementary to be used as university textbooks on thos…

+20C global average warming would correspond to roughly +40C land average warming. With polar regions seeing significantly more warming, at least +60C. That would see the coast of …

This is interesting, were you the captain for many of those years? I could totally understand a crew member being antisocial, but it seems like the crew would resent a leader who a…

I'm an academic who has never been to Antarctica. But I've done at least one mountaineering expedition (recreational not professional) every year for the past 30 years, where our l…