The reason it's "like printing money" to build an apartment building is that there are so few relative to demand. You're using the result of a shortage as an argument not to fix the shortage.
I agree. I wonder, though - the author has written a lot about political signaling and trust. I wouldn't put it past him to add a joke that's deliberately anathema to liberals, in order to relax the hackles of the conservatives he's trying to convince to use real medicine.
It's not liberal vs conservative in a policy sense, but in a cultural sense, much more important for signaling. I think many liberals (I include myself) would say it's racially tinged to joke that a doctor and a drug dealer must be related because they have the same Spanish name.
I see, so it separates the people that assume that it is an example of racial profiling because there is a POC involved? Is the assumption that the person being mocked is singled out because of their Spanish last name.
Something like that, sure. Apart from the question of whether the joke is good or bad, I think it's pretty clear from the reactions here that it has a political valence.
I agree that is strong point that such comments trigger some readers.
I imagine that any politically savvy author like this one evaluates the inclusion of jokes involving POC in their editing process today.
As far as intent, I am more inclined to believe the author decided to leave it intentionally, not to endear the conservative reader, but because they believe that while some readers may be offended, that they didn't want to engage in self censorship when they personally didn't see anything objectionable. After all, I think the conservative reader would gloss over this as unremarkable, and only some liberal readers would hear it as a "dog whistle", so they aren't endearing anyone.
I think this is inline with some of the author's other writings which advocate taking responsibility for one's actions and intentions, but not necessarily catering to everyone else's possible reactions and emotions.
That said, I'm usually assume pretty charitable intentions as a reader when it comes to this sort of thing, so I have my own biases.
The point remains that he singled out a latin-american surname in order to google and look for criminals to relate to. That means he expected to find something, and did. Would he think to do the same with an european surname? And more importantly, would it still sound cool and funny to his audience?
I honestly assumed he found the tweet when looking the researcher, and would have made the same joke if the name were Mike Smith. I didn't think the joke was especially entertaining, and don't see it being any more or less cool or funny with a Spanish name.
I could see how if the exact opposite were true, it could be racist.
Cars misjudging the speed of oncoming bicycles is a huge problem, even without pedal assist. I have added significant length to my bike commute to avoid places where cars turn across my path. I can take a 1% risk once in a while, but not twice a day.
This is a placebo-controlled trial. The statistical comparison shown (85% fewer hospitalizations & deaths in the treatment group) already takes into account the non-hospitalized cases in the control group.
It's stable, but the chemistry to get there isn't trivial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organofluorine_chemistry
(my Organic Chemistry class was more than 25 years ago, but I did research on drugs containing fluorine in grad school; we had to parameterize the force field specially, the bond has a ton of energy in it,
When I wrote my comment I knew somebody was going to come along and think I was implying CF3 was explosive.
They've tried a lot of these things, if not all of them. A colleague of mine in grad school was working on optimally using flame jets to crack the rock ("thermal spallation drilling").
I got loctite, which is a brand famous for making thread locking adhesive - so much so that the product is generally referred to just loctite in the industry, similar to tissues/kleenex and vacuum cleaner/hoover.
Apparently now it also means "a mineral of the basaltic and orogenic variety, typically occurring in white phosphates and blue crystalline crystals" - I love that the blue crystals are crystalline too!
Classic hype cycle. We've seen mRNA can do one thing really well, now it will be suggested to do everything. It will be a few years before we have a clear picture.
