krellor

So first there is a difference between reduction of meat products and an elimination. Having people consume less meat is good and helpful even if they don’t cut it out completely.

Second, as a vegetarian, I don’t understand what you mean by producing a bunch of monocultures. Do you think vegans just sit around all day eating avocados? I eat very little dairy or egg, and my diet consists largely of beans, rice, chilli, bread, stir fry, tofu, peanuts/legumes, veggies, baked potatoes, sandwiches, etc. I eat a large variety of staple goods cooked into a variety of dishes from around the world, and classic American fare, just without meat. Avocados and other resource intensive crops like almonds are a minority of my diet by a large margin. Things like beyond meat is also an infrequent treat.

Edit: here’s a decent article. https://www.nytimes.com/article/plant-based-diet.html

Generally speaking, a plant-based diet consists largely of vegetables, fruit, beans, legumes, grains and nuts, with little or no meat, dairy or fish.

Yet another major study has recently been published, showing that eating a plant-based diet is significantly better for the environment than eating a meat-based diet.

The research, conducted by Oxford University, found that people who follow a meat-free diet are responsible for 75 percent less in greenhouse gas emissions than those who eat meat every day, and that following a low-meat, vegetarian or pescatarian diet is proportionally less detrimental to land, water and biodiversity than a meat-heavy diet.

Referenced research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w

In that context it reads like the bill is more intended to shield people from charges who end up in altercations after telling people to leave.

Ants are the OG cooperative agent algorithms. Simulating ants use of pheromones to implement stigmergy path finding is a classic computer science algorithm.

The TPM requirement, I agree seemed a bit much without enough warning to the hardware industry. It’s all the more puzzling because it is trivial to install with the TPM requirement disabled.

That being said, I’ve done tech support forever ago, and I still help my in-laws with technology, and I get it. Microsoft is pushing improvements for people who otherwise wouldn’t do anything for their security or even continuity of operations. Windows hello, for all my gripes with it, gives people a password reset and recovery option for their OS.

But to your point again, I think the TPM requirement should have been phased in more slowly.

Have a great night!

All the way back to Windows NT Microsoft sold extended support for business customers while security updates stopped to the home customer. For the past several major releases Microsoft has a five year mainstream release, 5 year extended support, and then a paid extended period for business. That was the same for Windows 7 as far as I can tell. Honestly, it seems like selling individual esu’s is giving the individual more options. I mean, I don’t get it personally. But if I had some reason to absolutely stay on Windows 10, I would appreciate the option to pay for security updates for years 11, 12, 13+ of the OS.

That being said, I’m not sure who these people are that both love Windows 10 to the point of staying with it past regular support, loath Windows 11, and don’t want to give Linux a try. Like, barring weird technical requirements, that’s a Venn diagram that I just can’t square.

And I’m aware of the shenanigans Windows 11 pulls, but also know the savvy or opinionated user can disable most anything undesirable that makes it different from Windows 10. It’s a bit clicky, but you can disable or hide most things. And if it’s the principle of the thing… Get thee to a nixery!

I highly recommend Stephen Tetlock’s book, super forecasting, who is the sponsor of the project you mention.

One method of forecasting that he identified as effective was using a spreadsheet to record events that might occur over the next 6-18 months along with an initial probability based on good judgement and the factors you quoted. Then, every day look for new information that adjusts the forecast up or down by some, usually small percent. Repeat, and the goal is you will trend towards a reasonable %. I omitted many details but that was the jist.

Now, that’s for forecasting on a short ish timeframe. There is a place for more open ended reasoning and imagination, but you have to be careful not to fall prey to your own biases.

This particular forecast of OPs feels like it is ignoring several long running trends in technology adoption and user behavior without giving events that would address them, and forecasts something they care about doing better in the long-term, a source of bias to watch. I tend to agree with you that I think elements of this forecast are flawed.

I was unfamiliar with misophonia so I went looking into it. I know it is a poorly studied issue, but I wasn’t able to find any peer reviewed research where children’s noises in general were used or reported as a trigger. I found lots of discussion forums, but that is anecdotal.

The reason I went digging is because the op describes all children’s noises, happy, sad, whatever, whereas what I read in the literature was very specific noises were reported as triggers. E.g, lip smacking, chewing, pen clicking, etc. In one study, they even used videos of children and dogs playing to help participants calm down and establish a baseline. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227118

While I’m admittedly ignorant, it seems OP may have a more general aversion to children than I would expect of misophonia given what I’ve read from medical sources.

I only mention this as a counter suggestion to help op avoid self diagnosing and maybe going down the wrong track.

I think counseling is warranted to help sort it out.

I would echo the recommendation for counseling. However, is this a larger issue or unique to children? Do you find yourself getting disproportionately angry at other sources of annoyances? Answering that question might help you know whether there is a larger need to address.

In that case, never mix business and family. 😂

Right. Which gets us full circle, to never give investment advice, lol. That being said, at some point someone may sincerely look too you for guidance and you need to make a call as to whether you want to take that risk, what advice you give, and are you sure it is good advice.

I used to mentor student employees years ago, and when they wanted advice I always told them to max out workplace matches first, and then after that if they can save more, put it in tax advantaged savings programs that let you buy into indexed funds and never sell. In those cases you usually can’t even sell unless certain conditions are met and you sign disclosures, unlike most brokerages. Now, students you are giving them advice for the rest of there life and they likely don’t have $40k to panic sell/buy/sell to zero.

Honestly in my other comment I said never give investing advice, but as far as it goes, recommending investment in indexed funds is probably there exception with the caveat that it is a multi-year investment and there are dips.

That’s a great generalization! Don’t give lay people knowledge they can use to harm themselves, and recognize when you are the lay person.

Yes, times a thousand. But I would go even further.

Never give investment advice. You might explain what investments you have made and why you made them, but never give advice and never urge or prompt someone to invest. You should also end every conversation with “but that’s not advice and I’m not an expert.” It is too easy for either the investment to not work out, or for them to do it wrong (wrong timing, panic sale, misunderstood the options, etc).

The last thing you want on your conscience is someone investing a life changing amount of money just for it to go down in flames. I might invest $1000 in something that I think might pay off, tell someone they should invest, and next thing you know they drop in $40k and panic sell on a dip in two weeks, when I was planning to hold for five years. You never know.

Yup.

We do lots of things as a society because we’ve always done them that way, or it’s good enough, and not enough reason to go through the effort of changing everything including legal language, etc.

Happily, in this case I think ABV is about the best way we could have inherited, maybe only second to alcohol by weight in terms of consistency across temperature.

In the US, and I suspect other countries, the agency that regulates alcohol is different than the one that regulates food. In the US alcohol is regulated by the ATF and food by the FDA. Since it is the FDA rules that require nutritional labels and ingredients and not the ATF, most brands don’t list much.

Additionally, alcohol recipes are often considered trade secrets and closely held which might be why rules haven’t been introduced in many places.

Here is an article that talks a little more about different breweries and if they keep their ingredients secret or not.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-wine/89281511/why-doesnt-alcohol-doesnt-feature-nutritional-information-on-labels

Like I said, because the percent doesn’t change with the volume served. If you are an 1800s brewer you can calculate the ABV from samples, and subsequently sell kegs of various sizes, bottles, which in turn can be served in various amounts and the percent doesn’t change. And the industry never changed, nor the laws written. So it’s the way it is because that is how they used to do it and how laws were written and there hadn’t been a motivation for people to change that.

I would guess about 4% heavier with sugar, which is just enough so that a can of Dr. Pepper sinks while a diet can of Dr. Pepper floats. I think I recall the specific gravity of most sugar flavored soda was around 1.04 but I would need to check sources.

I haven’t seen anyone really answer the why of it, which is that the industry developed using a floating glass tool called a hydrometer which measures the specific gravity, or density, of liquids.

When you boil the wort to prepare for fermentation, you end up with a sugary liquid that is denser than water or alcohol. Water has a specific gravity of one, and the specific gravity of the wort is increased by everything you dissolved into it. You would float a glass hydrometer in it and lets say you get a reading of 1.055.

After fermentation the yeast has converted much of the sugar to alcohol and decreased the specific gravity. You measure a second time, and multiply the difference by a constant factor to get ABV. let’s say after fermentation you got a reading of 1.015.

1.055 - 1.015 = 0.04
0.04 * 131.25 = 5.25% ABV

We label with ABV because that was how it was calculated, and remained the same regardless of the quantity served.

There is a similar process for distilling as well. Before these methods people didn’t know the exact amounts, which led to fun things like navy and admiral strength.

Edit: also the 131 figure really should vary based on temperature since it is derived from the ratios of the density of ethanol and water. The higher the ABV the more important it is to factor temperature, and distilling requires more sensitive measurements and tools. But for beer, using 131.25 is fine and has about 0.2% error up to around 10% ABV.

That’s a good point. One of the things people struggle with I think is understanding the full scope of what was considered Greek and over what period of time. That and the competing representations of figures and the timeline of events means it really is like taking in a series of vignettes, each with its own take.

Stephen Fry did an excellent job making an updated and streamlined version of the mythology, effectively choosing from the myths what to accept as cannon in his retelling. If you haven’t read his books I would recommend them as being a wonderful story. He also narrated them himself on audible, which were also excellent.

Congrats on both!