Viewing profile — owisd

The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse si…

Feels like this has gone completely meta and it's now way more common to see people who don't care about children refusing to support that any proposal that might benefit children …

It does seem to be a general internet discussion trend that any complicated topic that can be lossily compressed into a few useful rules of thumb will develop zealots that consider…

Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.

They don't really 'call' elections since they only publish probabilities. If you'd bet on the candidate 538/Silver was more bullish than the bookies, then the only election year yo…

Feels like one of these things that's been known for decades in the general form: tools that take cognitive load off your working memory (a calculator, writing) free your brain up …

John Stuart Mill recognised over 150 years ago that free speech was only free if it was honest, good faith, polite discourse. Allowing it to descend into lies and ad hominems only …

If the end goal was user identification then the digital ID + zero knowledge proof age verification methods would be disallowed, which they aren't. https://blog.google/products-and…

If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. B…

The EU started charging carbon tariffs from 1 January- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...

The problem with "cleaning the data" is it sometimes strips away so much context as to give you a misleading impression. Rory Stewart once said it took him 40 hours to fully unders…

>> HN commenters are not legislators > That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it. To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a…

There's been rules around what constitutes advertising or product placement on TV for decades, didn't seem to be such an insurmountable issue first time around.

You can minimise the risk, but there's a point at which you have to accept that liberal democracy functions around these institutions so dismantling them creates the kind of vacuum…

> For many years this system served well Surely don't need to ditch the whole system then and just needs a better kill-switch.

The rules are inconsistent. You can be Mayor of Sheffield and an MP at the same time but you can’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester and an MP.

After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just fou…

The EFF are fighting a losing battle: > we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing dow…

Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, s…

Then they scrape together their pocket money and walk into a pawn shop and hand over the cash for a second hand smartphone. Plenty of free WiFi around.

You roll out the ‘bad parents’ trope then immediately admit bypassing parental controls is trivial.

> I think you can go back further Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 — “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morn…

This works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the sa…

They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019