The thing is, within normal, stable households, most of good hygiene practices - including hand-washing after using the restroom - are unnecessary. You already share all the microflora, and if one person brings in something contagious, you're gonna get exposed no matter what, and it's up to your immune system to save the day.
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.
Worms. Maybe bacteria and viruses can get everywhere regardless, but larger things like worm eggs are not going to travel so easily. Washing your hands can definitely help with the reduction in transmission of worm eggs.
Well, yes and no. You're correct that ZX Spectrum is a lot slower than the author estimates, but there's also a software-side performance bottleneck: the code is written in the built-in BASIC language, which on ZX Spectrum, was not only interpreted at runtime, but also almost comically unoptimized. For example, people would use "aftermarket" circle-drawing routines that performed 10x better than the stock ROM implementation.
BASIC on ZX Spectrum was meant for learning, but no serious software of the era relied on it for anything that needed to run fast.
I suspect this code could be 10x faster if written in assembly or a compiled language (a handful existed for the platform).
After learning to code on it, we used BASIC as means to write the utilities to load DATA statements representing Assembly code, hexdump monitors or compiled languages, although the later were relatively hard to take advantage of, given the space requirements.
Yeah, there was a C compiler, a Pascal compiler... I'm pretty sure others.
I would guess at least 100x for an optimized assembly version. Even 500x between this sort of interpreter and assembly is not unheard of.
It's a bit more complicated than that (but no less reprehensible).
The government obtained a warrant to seize the business and, as a part of that, to do a routine inventory of what's inside the boxes. After securing the warrant, the FBI said "sike, we're gonna rifle through customers' stuff to see if we can uncover new crimes... and we're gonna keep the contents via civil forfeiture too."
Several folks sued, and then the government dragged their feet for a while, but eventually said "ok, we'll return your stuff, you have no legal standing anymore." The courts agreed.
The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found in the deposit boxes they were not supposed to investigate in the first place. That's where the courts differed. The appeals court decision is a pretty scathing criticism of the whole fiasco, but strictly speaking, it only delivers a verdict on that last question (yes, the government has to destroy it).
> The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found
We really need to reign in theft under the guise of civil forfeiture. If clear abuses like this don't get that issue raised in courts I wonder what it's going to take.
The author wasn't asking you to write code, but to analyze some existing snippets. And it wasn't about "intuition about how compilers work", because not all of these deal with undefined behavior. Some are merely unspecified - i.e., platform-dependent in a non-crazy way (example: big endian vs little endian). So the gotcha is that you made the reader assume you might be talking about a modern Intel or ARM CPU, but what you really meant is that the return value will be different on PDP-11. Frankly, seems pedantic.
It's even worse: for example, the first one isn't undefined, it's merely unspecified - i.e., "depends on the system in a well-known and predictable way," not "you're doing something very wrong and the result is chaos."
> it's merely unspecified - i.e., "depends on the system in a well-known and predictable way,"
I think that should be implementation-defined behavior, not unspecified behavior? IIRC unspecified behavior in C is not required to be known or consistent.
My bigger problem with the first one is that the explanation is incorrect and it isn't actually about structure padding. The explanation is making the incorrect assumption that `sizeof(int)` is always 4, but it isn't. `sizeof(*(&s))` can be as small as 2.
In private life, we probably do more "dumb things" than we used to. The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gains from banning lawn darts and no longer using fire grenades are inconsequential in comparison.
To be fair, workplace safety has improved quite a bit - some of it thanks to regulation, some due to economic shifts (less mining, more office work). This improved the life expectancy of lower-class men.
But that aside, a lot of the gains in life expectancy have to do with very basic things - like flush toilets, along with generally improved standards of living.
Alcohol poisoning was and is quite rare. Plenty of long term health issues from drinking and smoking, but we don’t consider diseases from shared needles as an overdose either.
~140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year, only ~2,000 of those are alcohol poisoning.
Logically you're right alcohol ought to be treated the same but culturally it's very different in that it's been a part of partaking of food—eating and drinking since before the beginning of recorded time.
Alcohol is intrinsically ingrained in many if not most cultures.
> In private life, we probably do more "dumb things" than we used to. The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gains from banning lawn darts and no longer using fire grenades are inconsequential in comparison.
I would consider drug overdoses dramatically different than car accidents. To the point, "dumb things" where you put deadly chemical in jar (fire extinguisher) is not the same as purposely injecting yourself or accidentally losing control of your vehicle.
For what it's worth, while drug fatalities are increasing (arguably there was an intentional act to start drugs, granted addition is less so):
> But that aside, a lot of the gains in life expectancy have to do with very basic things - like flush toilets, along with generally improved standards of living.
I agree with you there, lots of minor things like vitamins, clean water, improved environmental controls, etc add up dramatically
So like, here's the thing with the overdose crisis - it is in fact just like the dangerous chemicals being put in a jar. It's actually specifically that.
The recent spike in drug overdoses has nearly nothing to do with people going out and making bad decisions (at least, not more than they've made over the last 50 years), but the fact that doctors and pharma companies, who ought to know better, keep putting fentanyl out into the world and making it as accessible as any other schedule 1 controlled substance. You know, like weed is a schedule 1 controlled substance (1).
According to NIDA (who are the don't-do-drugs-mmkay folks, responsible for gems like the egg ad and DARE), the lion's share of the spike in drug-related fatalities is due to instances where the drugs taken were "in combination with synthetic opioids other than methadone" (2). That's fentanyl, folks. As cheap and easy to get as it is lethal, and here we are putting it in hospitals because anesthesiologists think it's just the bee's knees.
So like, we're putting little microscopic landmines out there AND creating the circumstances for an unregulated black market that benefits from mixing said landmines into people's cocaine, which ostensibly they want because they have a really great business pitch they just gotta get out at 3am at the club (rather than a crippling addiction that's leading them to OD). IMHO, kinda similar to the fire grenades. No way bad shit ain't gonna happen and it's on us if we're surprised.
Fentanyl is not a schedule I substance. That would mean it’s not available for medical purposes or any other purpose. It’s schedule II, like other prescription drugs with a high potential for abuse (as listed in the link you provided). Anyway, the fentanyl that has recently been killing people is not diverted from the medical industry - it’s synthesized by the criminals who traffick it. There’s nothing wrong with fentanyl use in hospitals. The thing that makes it particularly dangerous compared to other narcotic analgesics is its very high potency by weight, which is not a problem in a medical setting where dosages are carefully measured and stock is of known and reliable concentrations.
Thank you for the information, I appreciate it. But for me your vernacular is a bit offputting. I had to force myself to finish reading your comment. "So like," in a written context takes away from the information. Or I could be wrong and people with similar speech will synchronize with you. I'm not attacking you, so I hope you don't feel that way, but it is something to consider.
I hear you, and I think it's a fair thing to establish for oneself what constitutes effective communication.
The question I would put to you though is this: what is the value of what was said, and following that, what effect is your linguistic filter having on your acquisition of quality, reliable information? (realizing, as another commenter pointed out, that I made an error and that fentanyl is actually schedule II, which is another bonkers discussion entirely).
Like you, I'm not on the defensive or trying to attack you in any way. I just think it's a valuable skill to be able to synthesize information from a variety of contexts; especially in a world like ours, where combining information from various sources (cultures, communities, etc) can add up to more than the sum of the individual datum.
As for my usage of the language (so you don't think I got GPT to write this for me), it's a nod to the American writers of the 1960s-70s, who had to deal quite a bit with the fiction of the self-destructive "druggie", created by a political regime that was pushing a drug war.
That said, it is something to consider that my point could have been lost. I appreciate the feedback.
It wasnt any one colloquialism that made it annoying, but the whole phrasiology package combined with the moral high ground.
"so like, folks, you know like, heres the thing, here we are, puttin out there, the fact that we are actually,"
Its my bias of course, but I have never respected anyone who speaks that way, nor have I been given reasons to do so. If its not a critical context, its fine. But this was, so it came off very karen.
Drug use is not a modern thing. Drug overdose is. It is much harder to overdose while smoking opium than swallowing pills or receiving a fentanyl injection.
People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit.
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
> Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design
The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent.
Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health.
And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.
They aren't the same arguments at all. All of those things are about the occasional indulgence of a hobby vs the time sink of constantly sitting on your phone and spending time with companies that want ALL of your time. Companies that, themselves, have lots of internal reporting concluding their platforms increase division and cause mental health issues.
I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.
The number of people on social media even that can’t mentally withstand the negative effects absolutely dwarf the number of people who have ever placed violent video games.
Notice I’m not making a statement on games at all? The could be the absolute worst thing in the world for mental health, and by scale social media still is the larger issue.
Nobody is arguing that you should feel sorry for short-sellers. It's just a mildly interesting fact, although it's less meaningful than implied in the article, because Tesla is also one of the most-heavily traded companies on the market.
A lot of "index fund" folks criticize shorting and other "gambling" tactics, but it's probably worth noting that the argument for the soundness of index funds hinges on there being a class of traders who identify bad businesses and try to drive their price down. Otherwise, you're just pumping money into a snapshot of the market with no regard for the health of the constituent businesses, and it eventually ends in tears.
There are reasons for short selling and we'd be in stone age without it.
Black-Scholes delta hedging (more fancy called "replication of theoretical option prices") relies on it. Shorting for Black-Scholes also has two facets: one where your loss is limited, when you buy a call then delta-hedge by shorting against it. And another one where the market is up to get you, selling a put and hedging by shorting. Works in theory but in practice you get funked and there's little to nothing you can do against it when it happens. I suspect most "betting against Tesla" shorters were actually institutional put sellers. Case when they weren't "betting" at all but hedging.
Price discovery doesn't rely on short selling. An active investor with stock in a company is already motivated to monitor if the company is overvalued and sell their stake. Short selling may improve the efficiency of price discovery but given the relativly high costs of needing to pay interest on the borrowed stock while you hold a short position (in contrast to a long position where you get payed dividends), I'm skeptical on how much selling actually helps with this.
There are certainly ways to use short selling as a hedge for other positions. But in those cases, loosing money on the short is typically good because it (hopefully) correlates to making more money on your main investment.
The market is not an isolated thing sitting out there in nature. It is a complex system built and run by humans. Index investors are freeloading off of the work that a bunch of active investors are doing. This is good for the index investors because they do not need to pay for all the work that active investors are doing for them.
Active investors, for their part, need to either maintain enough of an edge over freeloaders to justify their pay, or serve a niche market with concerns other than "line go up" (this is where the "hedge" in "hedge fund" comes from).
If every participant is an index investor, then no one is doing the actual work, so the entire system crumbles.
Index funds aren’t the entire market. Just specific major stocks (eg, s&p 500). You want someone “thinning the herd” to keep the index sound over time.
It's easy to get hung up on specific examples you can't connect with, but our entire lifestyles are centered around preferences, not needs - and I'm sure it's also true for you. All you need is a 3 x 3 x 8 ft sleeping pod, a waste chute, and a dispenser of protein slurry. Almost everything else is there to accommodate the odd whimsical desire.
Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result.
We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.
A lot of people are misunderstanding my point. It's not that intangibles don't matter or that people shouldn't spend money on their preferences.
Trust me; I spent $2,000 on a bicycle recently. Not a sports bike or mountain bike or anything. Just a bike for getting around town. Am I under some illusion that I needed to spend 2k on a transportation bike? Of course not. But it's something that I use every single day and derive great joy from using, so I prioritize having a nice one. So I am no stranger to spending money on optional things.
I also enjoy mountain biking, but I only really do it when I'm with my dad which is like 2 times a year. So instead of buying a mountain bike, I rent them. And I rent nice ones (nicer than I would buy, man those things get expensive).
My point is that there is a bias toward ownership of certain conventional things that don't get used very often, and are easy to obtain temporarily. (And of course every example I used had people responding, "I have that and use it all the time!", which is also missing the point.)
It's not obvious that buying the frequent item and renting the infrequent item is the reasonable thing to for all situations and contexts.
I don't see a complete argument where doing so is strictly more rational than doing the polar opposite, i.e. hypothetically, renting the frequent item and vice versa.
I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
> It's not obvious that buying the frequent item and renting the infrequent item is the reasonable thing to for all situations and contexts.
Owning something means taking on the liabilities of storage, maintenance, and depreciation. Renting allows you to only pay for the parts of those liabilities commensurate with your time of usage. Therefore if your time of usage of something is small, there are relatively more gains in reducing your share of these liabilities in this way.
Conversely, owning confers the benefit of reducing the friction involved in each individual use of something. So it stands to reason that the more useages, the more benefits owning confers.
> I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
I agree that they are different. But the attitude I am arguing against is that of 'if I don't own this thing, these experiences will never happen'. In other words, people seem to be completely discounting the substitute experiences. In reality, there are other places to go besides one's house, and even at one's house there are other things to do besides eating dinner, and even if one wants to eat dinner at one's house, it is not that different whether you eat it at the kitchen table, on a fold-out table in a game room, or in a bona fide dining room.
To the first point, I get the heuristic of a cost-benefit analysis of buying vs renting, with hidden costs being things like maintenance (liabiliities), opportunity cost, transactional convenience (friction). But this heuristic is just that, it has no validation power over e.g. the commenter who pointed out "I want the long car rides to be in my own car which I know and love". Etc. Your mistake is using a heuristic (from idealized spherical cow economics) as a totalizing theory for human motivations.
To the second point, what a dining room offers is social intimacy and formality at once. This is something a kitchen table does not do (formality, think a White House dinner), and a restaurant cannot do either (intimacy, think traditional cultural celebrations at home such as Chinese New Year entailing many social rituals and practices). A dining room has the fundamentally distinct property of being a setting for both. That's the actual source of disagreement which is why there were so many objections by other commenters given your continued insistence that "it's not that different".
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.