I see this model of science as potentially misleading. One obvious reaction to the "too many bricks" idea is to try to put together some grand theory yourself (an "edifice"), but this nearly always means becoming a crank. Likewise, I don't think see how a scientist has ever been stopped by the mere existence of too much trivial research, though they might be diverted from better work by the need to produce mediocre work quickly. I prefer Hamming's questions: "What are the most important problems in your field?" followed by "Why aren't you working on them?"
Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.
> Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.
What difference does it make for a non-public company? They can pay themselves more salary either way. The shares aren't really valuable until then.
As to a charity - if you really believe so. It doesn't even enter the books. Have you not seen an in-person donation site? Someone gives $100, the staff keeps the $100, takes out $50, records $50 and puts that in the donation box. After a few more layers the actual donation could be just $1. I've seen these at your regular big name charities - all the time.
And let's not get started on the sponsor a child that doesn't exist options...
This is a randomized trial with hundreds of subjects. The two groups should be statistically similar to each other in their magnesium levels (and other attributes). That's the purpose of randomization: so you don't have to find and control for confounders afterwards like you do in a non-randomized trial. It's easy to obscure or reverse a result by controlling for the wrong variables, for some examples see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/24/you-need-more-confound...
On closer, look it is a randomized trial with 3 hundreds of fat, hypertense patients, most of which are on some kind of drug or platelet treatment. That 70% hypertense bit pointing towards most of them being magnesium deficient to begin with.
The quantities involved are so small that they might as well not have bothered. In Asia, people have consumed +10mg of K2 for extended periods of time.
720 µg MK-7 plus 25 µg vitamin D or matching placebo for 24 months are laughably small. So small one can only wonder if they were trying the homeopathy where they keep diluting some concoction and claim it still has some effect.
Not even getting into the issue of whether D supplements are an adequate replacement from sunlight.
If the proposed intervention is giving a pill, it seems fair to test that instead of a proxy. The study had hundreds of people; if the effect were big enough to be clinically significant they hopefully would have detected it, even with some patients failing to take the pills.
I'm talking about assaying the subjects' blood for prior and subsequent levels of the vitamin under test. Inasmuch as we have no way to tell whether they took the pills, we don't know whether the groups were properly randomized for their pre-intervention levels, diets, or effectiveness at metabolizing the supplement. It may even be the case that people with high CAC scores in the first place (the test population) already suffers from one or more of these problems across the board.
It isn't that hard to test people's blood, and yet the researchers prefer us to take it on faith that their sorting of control and intervention groups ironed all of this out? If I sound unreasonable, I don't apologize for it: public health decisions are important.
The question in this trial was: Will people in this at-risk population have less calcium buildup in the heart if we give them vitamin K2? The answer was, on average, no. That's the key piece of information for public health.
Blood tests would tell us if the randomization ended with the two groups being very different, but the prior probability of that is small. Blood tests would also tell us if there is some subgroup that benefits more from the treatment, but with an increased risk of getting the answer wrong due to smaller sample sizes, which would lead to worse public health decisions.
I think A Deepness In The Sky is actually better, especially for people on here. The story takes place on spaceships thousands of years in the future, but the characters are still using code based on Unix timestamps, and still complaining about legacy software.
100 percent. I read deepness before fire, and was terribly disappointed by the latter, even though it was a perfectly great book - just didn't measure up.
There is a deeper story. The realistic technical details are the bones; the flesh is the relationships between two human civilizations and a less-advanced alien race that doesn't know humans exist.
You call passing a bill through Congress "immediate", and you think it can be "undone quickly"? I think the long-term budget deficit is too high, but the budget process is not responsive enough to be used to control inflation. (It's also too slow and clumsy when used the other way, as fiscal stimulus.)
One way of using the deficit deliberately as an economic control dial would be for Congress to grant the Federal Reserve the authority to adjust payroll tax rates within a given range. I doubt this could ever happen politically, though.
If Japan had just destroyed a US base, then it would have been proportionate to destroy a Japanese base in retaliation. In reality, Japan launched total war on all its neighbors, and Pearl Harbor was just the first part of this to touch the US directly. The scale of deaths was in the millions before the US entered the war, and there was no guarantee that it wouldn't get far worse. Calculating a proportionate response as if this were a little diplomatic incident just doesn't make sense in this context.
Yes this aligns with my point. This usual analysis has the US acting as a police force to prevent significant aggression, anywhere in the world. However, I believe the mainstream sentiment today is against the US taking on this role (consider the negative view on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc).
For some reason the critical lens of “anti police action” has not been applied to the Japan conflict, in the same way it has been to, say, Vietnam. This inconsistency is what I’m interested in.
I speculate that if the pacific conflict was a standalone war that this lens would be more likely to have been applied by now.
The point of the police in a society is that they have a near-monopoly on armed force, and therefore criminals can't hope to win by escalation. In a world where the US has by far the biggest military, it can to some extent arrogate to itself the role of a police force, which raises the issues you suggest.
WW2 is not this situation, and it's an anachronism to analyze it as such. Pearl Harbor was followed by a string of other US defeats. For a while, it looked like Japan would set up an empire from Alaska to Australia. You don't have the luxury of deciding to hold back in a situation where all your efforts might not be enough.
Was any US territory outside of Asia legitimately at risk? I don’t think so? I think most Americans today would agree that the US should not attempt to acquire territory in Asia, and so would not agree with military action to preserve such territory. But this position is for some reason not carried through to the Japan conflict. In what way is this observation inaccurate?
There were some small Alaskan islands that Japan actually seized. The non-military population of Alaska in 1941 was tiny, about 73k, and land links to the lower 48 were weak, so isolating and occupying the territory by sea might have worked. The same goes for at least the smaller Hawaiian islands. The Philippines were successfully occupied despite a much larger population.
Regarding Asia, I think "to acquire territory" is not the real question. Most Americans today would say that we should assist staunch allies such as South Korea if they were invaded, without any desire to acquire their territory. That goes more for the Philippines in 1941, since the US had given them a 10-year security guarantee under the 1934 Philippine Independence Act.
> If you go fossil fuel, you have only 40% efficiency for Fossil Fuel -> Electricity,
This is a big underestimate for natural gas now that we mostly use combined-cycle gas plants (basically a jet turbine bolted to the ground, with its exhaust heat used to power a traditional steam plant). Combined-cycle efficiency is over 60%, which changes your math significantly.
more importantly, decoupling the electricity generation with the heating, means that improvements made to electricity generation instantly flows into each home, vs using gas for home heating means _every home_ would need to purchase new gas equipment if improvements become available, to get the improvements - a major capital cost for the individual which may not be able to do it.
This is not what "missing" means, or else every parent at work with kids at school would have a missing child (after all, they don't have the kids right now). The banks have loaned out the money, but they do keep track of whom they loaned it to.
this is a poor analogy. first of all, the parents (depositors) may not have their kids (money) right now, but the school (bank) definitely does. real banks definitely don’t
it would be like if at the end of the day the parents came to pick up their kids and—on a good day—10% of them were available to be picked up
a more appropriate analogy would be if the school was handing out the kids to random people that very possibly wouldn’t give them back, or if they would, possibly not for at least a few years once they’ve grown up a bit
the whole concept of a modern bank is ridiculous and a lot of people need to seriously reset their thinking around it. if you want a high risk investment than you can put your money in a fund. high street banks should not be high risk investments, especially for the measly interest rates they give out
In my analogy, parents = banks and school = bank loan recipients (the federal government, if the bank has bought government bonds). The money isn't missing when it's loaned out by the bank; the bank knows when it will get it back, and can estimate the cost of getting it back early.
The concept of a "modern" bank (federally-insured fractional reserve banking) is 90 years old now. Its faults are well understood and, for all the drama, it isn't high-risk for ordinary depositors.
How would you get people to trust you to do this and make a solution that they can maintain in the long term? It's hard for me to envision an organization accepting this offer.
I know people for whom what I described is the daily job.
Of course, the respective organization has to ensure that there do exist programmers who can maintain the software (but having to maintain it or adding new features from time to time is typically a lot less work than writing the original software from scratch).
