It sounds like they don't really use it. Their about page says:
We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-
recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more
efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-
folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then
teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins
faster than ever!
Indicating that at some point they may use it, though judging from recent trends in reinforcement learning, they probably won't.
> We’ve seen the opposite phenomenon happen in every market.
Not really? If buffalo wings are like a man's name, or men's pants, the same trend would be for women to adopt those things (which we do). Similarly, if you market only towards women, it is seen as somewhat shameful for a man (and sometimes, even for a woman) to purchase that good.
Is that not the exact phenomenon I'm talking about though? The markets exist because masculinity says it's otherwise embarrassing.
The same thing doesn't always exist in reverse. It's not embarrassing for women to drink black coffee or a beer, but it defies social masculinity for a man to drink sugary coffee or a mixed drink. It's fine for women to wear jeans, flannel, basically all mens clothes but it's taboo for men to wear any feminine piece of clothing.
You can probably come up with examples that betray this as a rule, which is why I'm not claiming it is one. It's a social influence that's pervasive to the degree that masculinity kills men who don't see a doctor or men that have their masculinity questioned and they retaliate with murder.
You hardly see women committing crimes because they were perceived as masculine.
I disagree. It shows that far more gender-neutral or boy names become significantly more popular as girl names, compared to the other way around. That's pretty interesting.
This conforms to the idea that a boy with a girl's name (or other girlish attribute) is bad, whereas a girl with a boy's name (or other boyish attribute) is not as bad, or is even good.
This happens to many things. Once something becomes female dominated, men steer clear. Clothing and fashion is another example. Heck even some sports are like that!
If a tree is planted, grows, and then for example is burned down and paved over, that'd be true. But if a tree grows and eventually dies in a forest, it'll be replaced with new trees naturally, cancelling out the CO2 leaked from the tree dying. This C02 can also be stalled by harvesting the tree and using it in some way that stops C02 from being released for a longer time than natural.
I did some math on this, and if all the countries in the advanced world planted fast growing trees alongside all paved and unpaved roads, over 40 years, that could potentially be enough to sequester half of all carbon emitted by humans.
Given that carbon has a half life of between 20-200 years, and that we appear to be reaching peak emissions, and that a lot of estimates say our emissions should drop by 70% just given how often we replace power plants and how completive renewables are right now and are projected to be in the future -- it seems like planting trees really could be enough.
Could you share your math somewhere? I’m genuinely interested, and did your calculations take into account lowered cooling costs caused by tree shaded buildings?
It did not. But I think that's a HUGE consideration, as is the potential to reduce particulates in the air dramatically.
Here's a link to the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543605 -- on mobile so I can't figure out how to get the comment URL. If you're interested, just go there and search for my username -- onlyrealcuzzo. I'd love a second set of eyes on it. Not sure the math is right.
That is horrible for the ocean. Acidification will be killing off whole ecosystems and lead to drastically lower carbon sequestration by our oceans. As well as other horrible problems for us humans, who are still quite dependent on functional living oceans.
I think the OP is saying that most trees you plant now will be dead in 20-200 years and returning their carbon to the atmosphere through natural decay. Trees end up being a temporary solution. A permanent solution basically requires us to bury the carbon back in the ground where we found it in the first place, or in some other form that doesn't decay.
Numbers are important and should be discussed transparently. Lots of variation in guesstimates, fudging, simplifications, etc cloud the issue and give drastically different "good ways forward". So, please, correct my back-of-the-envelope estimate below:
E.g. from [1]: "Following the estimations of carbon stock including above ground biomass, the total stock in the studied chestnut forests could be ordered as follows: CF3 (105.8 t C ha-1) > CF1 (102.1 t C ha-1) > CF2 (76.3 t C ha-1). The pure chestnut forest CF3 characterized with the highest total carbon stock per hectare and only 20.6 % from it is accumulated in the aboveground tree biomass."
Chestnut is one of the best carbon sequestering forest options we have. Estimate (overly positively) that this capacity cycles over 100y. Fudge down the CO2 and CH4 release from decomposition. That gives ca 100 tC/ha over 100y, aka 1tC/(ha y) or 100tC/(km2 y).
Globally we have ca 35GtCO2 or 10GtC carbon emission per year. Current forests store about 15% of that, but we are currently loosing forests at a rapid rate, and we need to not only reach neutral but also sink the 100y or so of spewing we've already fucked up. So let's keep the number at 10GtC/y.
10GtC/y would then require 100E6km2 of NEW perfect assumption chestnut forest.
We have ca 500E6km2 of total land surface on earth. That means we need to set aside 20% of all land on earth for our NEW chestnut forest. But we don't have that much land that can sustain something like this. Forest grows less well outside of humid temperate to tropical regions. E.g. Antarctica, Sahara, the steppes, boreal forest regions, etc. E.g: All agricultural land, both fields and grazing, is 11% of total land area but over one third of all culturable land, the rest of which is already mostly forest. Even if we covered all growth-possible land area that is not already forest we simply don't have enough land. And we would be out of farmland.
Based on this back of envelope calculation tree planting is not a viable solution. It's a good step in the right direction, but nothing to get the crowds overly excited about.
Instead, e.g. azolla is around 15x more potent as sequestering growth stock than forests, and it grows floating on water. Genetically engineering azolla to grow fast in higher salinity would be a better way to combat climate change. We have plenty of ocean surface area. There will be downsides to such a solution, but compare with other solutions or the horrors of what will be if we don't act...
And I'm sure someone can cook up some gm-franken-algae that is even more potent.
My point, if any, is to make sure to actually run the numbers. Get different estimates then pay skilled scientists to get better estimates. Discuss the numbers, assumptions, simplifications. Don't get the general population stuck on low worth paths when they could start fighting for more valuable ones.
And I don't propose "stop planting trees". I argue that planting trees is a good thing, but only a minor item that is overshadowing more valuable options in the general debate. We need to get people to start facing reality to the point where they can start thinking about compromises. There is no "solution" that don't require drastic changes in how we use our land and live our lives.
Side note: nuclear is the only short term low land-usage footprint solution I can see, and drastic genetic manipulation biomass or vast nuclear powered direct capture are the only long term solutions I can guesstimate. Anyone that can show me interesting alternatives?
> the bare edges of the canvas suggest that the woman has agency, physical and otherwise; in Morisot’s garden scenes or beflowered interiors, the dresses melt into the background, refuting the viewer’s possession of the figure. Morisot’s messy brushstrokes—some of the most daring among her contemporaries’—suggest that “woman” is pure fiction, an idea bursting at the seams of the experience it supposedly names.
Seems like the author is projecting their own opinions onto Morisot's art.
That being said, it's incredibly sad that women were so devalued and minimized in that time.
> That being said, it's incredibly sad that women were so devalued and minimized in that time.
This might be traced back to the 'first' art critic, John Ruskin campaigned vigorously for a better education for women and girls than was available. However, a big motivator for this was his fear of industrialisation. He saw woman as the counter-balance to this force, and strongly positioned them as the centre of family life: feminine and (importantly) uncompetitive.
Much art criticism that followed inherited these assumptions.
Popular vote has never meant anything in America in all it's existence. But the point is a person with zero political experience, completely outside the political echo chamber/insiders club just won the most powerful office on earth. Whether you are for him or against him I believe it does show that people can absolutely start a change.
Yes, people can...in the aggregate. But aggregating people takes a lot of work. So unless you devote yourself to the task of saving social security (by mobilizing lots of people to fight with you) then you're not going to have much influence. The ~50 million Trump voters, how much influence do they have with him right now? fuck all. I don't mean that as a comment on him, just pointing out the huge asymmetrical power differentials. Voting does make a tiny difference, but that's like saying you can steer a boat by getting the passengers to rush to one side of the deck or the other. It's technically true but nobody actually steers a boat that way.
He's not a politician. The last one not a politician was Dwight Eisenhower, and the list is real sparse before him. [1]
But I never said I was compared to Trump, I was stating that common people absolutely made a significant impact to this election against the wishes of the incumbents
Just because you're surprised, doesn't mean it was "the people". You can't have an Electoral College system in which shuffling Toledo across state lines changes the electoral outcome and credit the people for political outcomes.
Not that I know of, but the point is that our system ought to be robust against historical and statistical flukes. If you're going to decide elections via first-past-the-post at all, you should at least make the election pass a 95% likelihood hypothesis test for difference-of-means or something.
I''m of the same sentiment, but I feel that even more rigor and a smaller p value should be demanded from our election methods. 99% seems like a nice number.
is that really true? this election more than ever most voters believed they had to choose the lesser of two evils and didn't like their choices. both candidates had record disapproval ratings. i understand trump
isn't a typical politician but it didn't quite seem like people got what they want... more that they voted against hillary and for a republican supreme court.
Trump easily won the popular vote for the 48 states that aren't California and New York. Popular vote indeed. There's a very good reason the electoral college exists.
And if you take out a couple states, Clinton won the electoral college. What's your point? That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?
> That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?
Ahh, yeah. That's the point. So America isn't CaliforNewYork.
The electoral college isn't a scam, it exists to bring balance, so your hipster javascript developer gets the same weight as a coal miner in rural Ohio.
Why should the coal miner get more of a voice than the guy who lives in a city? They're both citizens, right?
They both get to vote on their state, city, and county stuff. Why should the guy who lives in the middle of nowhere get to say "my vote's worth 50x what yours is, sucker!!"?
The minority already has constitutional protections to live, love, worship, engage in commerce, employ speech and association, without interference from the majority. Their rights are already guaranteed by the constitution.
Getting a way-outsized vote in federal elections is undemocratic, and doesn't protect the minority from "tyranny" so much as give it outsized power, just as a quirk of geography.
It doesn't reassure me that we give much more weight to a minority of voters just because they live in less densely populated areas. That's completely arbitrary.
It could be argued that 100 people living in 3 counties have a greater diversity of concerns and opinions than 100 people sharing an apartment complex.
Is "diversity of concerns" a primary goal of democracy? Obviously for issues that directly affect a local region, I do think those should be handled by a local government. The people in the apartment complex probably ought to have different rules than people in rural counties, each reflecting the concerns of the local population.
But there's only one President for the whole country, for better or for worse. It doesn't make sense to me to apply this idea here.
From your description it sounds like thats the only time it makes sense, to me at least. Ie, the President should hopefully be working for the whole country, not just the most dense areas.
I guess another way to look at it is that the president is responsible for such a large area, that population is far less of a concern (in my view). S/he should know not to set laws that focus on a locality, because the states can do a far better job at that.
I don't want the president to set laws for me (just an example) focusing on people in downtown LA or NYC - i don't live there, my world is very different. I want my president to consider the whole country, and let the states/counties handle raw locality.
> From your description it sounds like thats the only time it makes sense, to me at least. Ie, the President should hopefully be working for the whole country, not just the most dense areas.
But that's not the alternative proposed. The alternative proposed is that a human in a sparsely populated area gets MORE influence than a human in a densely populated area. If you go with the national popular vote idea, the President should be the candidate who got the most votes by humans without regard for the population density where they live.
> I guess another way to look at it is that the president is responsible for such a large area, that population is far less of a concern (in my view).
Population density is an extremely meaningless demographic to adjust for. Seriously, why does that matter? Sure, you can show a map of the US and see that most land area went Republican even when the Democratic candidate wins, but if you think about it for a moment, why does land area matter? Surely no one would go so far as to suggest that every unit of land area should have the same influence on the election (i.e. you get to vote once for every acre of land you own).
> I don't want the president to set laws for me (just an example) focusing on people in downtown LA or NYC - i don't live there, my world is very different. I want my president to consider the whole country, and let the states/counties handle raw locality.
That's a reasonable desire, but how does giving people in sparsely populated areas MORE influence help this? It may help you if you live in a sparsely populated area, but it doesn't help the goal of having the president consider the entire country.
The U.S. should move to a political system where coastal city-dwelling individuals have 4x the voting power of people who live inland and in rural areas.
It's not arbitrary, or about whose votes matter more or population density at all. It's because the United States is actually a union of what was, before the founding of the country as we know it, relatively sovereign states. By joining the union they were giving up much of that sovereignty. It was good for the union that more states joined, so the great compromise was to allow states who were fearful of being dominated by foreign opinions to be granted additional votes just for being 1 state. So Rhode Island residents don't just vote as individuals - they get some votes proportionally and some votes for being a member state of the union. How do so many people educated in the United States not know about that compromise?
I know the reasons the electoral college was chosen. I still don't think it's necessarily a good idea, especially given the modern role of the President.
The design of the electoral college was not to prevent influence by larger states. That's the function of the Senate. The electoral college exists in part to enable the 3/5ths compromise and in part to allow the vote of the people to be changed by someone who is theoretically more sophisticated.
You are entitled to your opinion! That's not how the system is currently designed.
> You keep implying that the rest of us aren't Americans and don't deserve an equal voice, and don't be surprised if we start trying to secede or revolt violently against the tyrants ruling over America's urban majority against our will.
Good luck with that. You want to bleed out in the street, go for it. Plenty of other first world countries for me to move my family to.
>Good luck with that. You want to bleed out in the street, go for it. Plenty of other first world countries for me to move my family to.
Very few others with low taxes, no universal health-care, no universal pension, and a general fetish for empowering the rural bourgeoisie at everyone else's expense.
Personally, I've got three countries on my short list to apply to, maybe four. But I'm still going to start taking self-defense lessons, because with a neo-fascist government, you people have gone too damn far. You are enabling the most violent, evil elements in society, and that warrants a response.
To be fair, there are probably a whole lot more gang members than there are neo-Nazis, even if we widen that umbrella to include all racial supremacist groups with significant violent tendencies. Hell, throw in religious extremists for good measure, of all stripes, and I bet non-racially-motivated gangs still commit way more murders in a given year (in the US, which seemed like the context of this exchange).
You're right, that's a very fair point. Gangs kill more people than Nazis, in the same way that car crashes kill far more than terrorists.
I think if I didn't suspect that neo-Nazis were cozy with the government nowadays (long before this election I heard frightening stories of white supremacists working their way up in police departments and the FBI), I'd have every grounds to dismiss them in favor of worrying about gangs and car crashes.
CA would be the 7th largest economy in the world if it were its own country. NY would be 11th. But yes, let's just pretend like they don't matter when it comes to the US as a whole.
> CA would be the 7th largest economy in the world if it were its own country. NY would be 11th. But yes, let's just pretend like they don't matter when it comes to the US as a whole.
Except we're not pretending like they don't matter. We're pretending they have a proportionate say. Regardless of wether your hypothetical proportion would be sound or not the proportion just isn't based on the size of the economy of a state.
Businesses work that way though.
You're free to petition for a CAexit or NYexit if you desire. Not that that'd happen either...
> Except we're not pretending like they don't matter. We're pretending they have a proportionate say.
Well... they don't have a proportionate say, if by "proportionate" you mean "in proportion to their population". They have less say then that.
But they also don't have a proportionate say if you mean "in proportion to their only being one state out of fifty". They have more say than that.
All of which is by design. Whining about it now is just sour grapes. Now, if people had been complaining about it since they first learned about it in junior high civics class, then I'd be more inclined to grant them that they have a principled position...
I live in Washington State, which was essentially totally ignored by all the candidates. The reason is simple - WA is an overwhelmingly blue state with a winner-take-all delegate selection.
If elections were based on the popular vote, then the candidates would have been here campaigning, which might have dramatically changed the vote in WA. Not enough to turn it red, but a big chunk.
My point is that changing the rules on how Presidents are elected will change how they are campaigned, the platforms of the candidates, etc. One cannot assume a voter tally under one scheme will be the same as the tally under another - not at all.
Not when it comes to an election. It is what it is but the electoral college is the rules to the game. The popular vote does not mean one thing in America when it comes to an election.
You don't even have to go further than electricity and water supply to see how much they rely on other states. But I'm sure there's a lot of other areas where they're reliant on other states as well.
Other than the Colorado River, does California depend on other states for water? If California seceded, wouldn't they retain their part of the Colorado River Compact?
Power, I'll grant you. They've been "exporting pollution" by having power plants built in other states for a while now...
Yea, and many of us don't live in CA. The country is 50 states, of which the president should represent. If you want laws specialized for CA, pass them in CA. This is why federal should be staying out of local affairs in my book. Because the needs for CA and NY are drastically different than less populated areas.
There is no winning here. You either ignore the voice of CA or the voice of less populated states. You're arguing to ignore a voice, just the same as it is now.
That's like saying: let's ignore 58.55 million voters for no reason other than where they live. More than 18% of the entire US population.
States are arbitrary dividers, it's silly to think there's some great reason for allowing people in some random groups (states) have much more voting power than others. What if the dividers were based on income, race, etc? Wouldn't even that be more reasonable?
I think you underestimate the power of neuroses. Good chance no money was involved.