Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.
China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.
Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.
And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.
Most people grasp the reasonableness standard for running a disease lab: you were negligent if the diseases break containment, because lab standards should be in place to prevent that obvious risk.
Under the wet market scenario, it's not instinctively clear to me what was unreasonable about the practices of the vendors at the market. Does selling bats more likely than not result in spreading disease? Or selling bats in proximity to pangolins? It seems like the vendors were doing the same thing vendors have done for millennia, not doing something unusually or obviously substandard.
Think about it this way: if a French tourist gets a severe toxinfection while eating in a seedy restaurant in some corner of the USA, would the French state, or even the family of the person, sue the US government for failing to enforce health codes / not having good enough health codes? Would you seriously imagine that trial happening and being successful?
Conversely, say the same person got equally badly sick while visiting a friend who works in a US government lab that researches and deals with live viruses. Wouldn't you feel the US government has a higher chance of losing a suit on this?
“ We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Steve Jobs declared in an email to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android."
Alexa has dropped off. Every echo device I have was better in the past. My wife is lucky to trigger them half the time. They have always done better with male voices, but it’s worse than ever. And when Alexa does respond, it’s frequently an ad.
Of course, the division famously lost $10bn, and so they must be reducing compute. But the fall has been noticeable.
I understand Elon and Pmarca to be saying that this behavior is programmed in by 'safety teams' at Meta.
It is an odd way of calcifying late-20th century American upper class anxiety. If we can't give the engineers a different moral goal, it will become the default mode of knowledge. A more immediate problem than "AI will kill us" is the dev teams determined to avoid "erasure" or "digital genocide" or whatever they'd call a race/culture-agnostic AI.
GM can’t match the lobbying power of local dealers in the state houses. Every state rep has a dealer or two in their district, and they employ staff who vote.
And, to be fair to the dealers, there is a long history of the makers trying to screw them over, and the public, too.
The dealership model is an anachronism from the days when the Big 3 US automakers were basically a cartel with a lock on the market, and predates the internet. For new sales it has no real advantages over what Tesla is doing, and for service the public would be better served by strong right-to-repair laws so people can have their vehicles serviced at any independent mechanic (or do it themselves).
If you can handle putting the nozzle on your garden hose, you should be able to handle it.
In the US, the water pipe almost always connects to the toilet through a small shutoff valve. After the valve, it connects to the toilet through a "supply." The supply is basically a short garden hose, with screw-on connections at both ends.
Shut off the water at the wall.
Flush to empty the toilet tank.
Unscrew the hose at the toilet, and screw that end into what amounts to a y, or splitter that comes with the bidet.
From the splitter, screw one side back into the toilet connection; the other goes to the bidet itself.
Turn back on the water at the wall.
(This is for a simple cold-water bidet. If you need heated water or electricity, it can be more complex.)
I mean, but don't you need warm water and/or electricity? I can't see liking a bidet if it's basically just cold tap water shooting up my bum. Not sure that's going to do it for me.
I've always thought that both hot water and electricity would be a minimal barrier to entry for a bidet. And that neither of these exist in a typical toilet closet. Am I fundamentally wrong about this??
Whether you need it probably depends on your climate and your house.
Water in pipes inside a house's "thermal envelope" is presumably around 72 deg. F. I wash my hands with "cold water" without wincing. Tap water strikes me as tepid if I drink it without ice.
If your pipes run through an outside wall in Canada, it might be a different story.
If you do need warmer water, and the bidet heats it, you probably just need an electrician to fish a wire and add a receptacle. That's not outrageously complex, usually, but I tend toward calling a professional for anything behind the walls.
> Water in pipes inside a house's "thermal envelope" is presumably around 72 deg. F.
The pipes in my house are in the crawlspace underneath the house, which is definitely nothing like 72F this time of year. Any hot water more than 10 feet or so away from the water heater runs pretty cold for several gallons.
That sounds like a good weekend project, putting split foam insulation around your pipes. 8' runs are a couple of bucks at the big box stores.
It's not quite as efficient, but I put in a recirculation pump and a timer to keep the water warm throughout the pipe during the day. The clothes washer was never getting warm water, and we wasted a lot at the shower waiting for warm water to reach it.
Yes, but the theorem is meant to explain what can happen in the universe over long time scales.
The point is that there isn't enough time in the universe for all the random stuff to happen that scientists pin on random chance. The theorem was memorable, but a cop out.
> Yes, but the theorem is meant to explain what can happen in the universe over long time scales.
I never understood it that way. I always interpreted it as a fun way to explain the mathematical truth that no matter how low a probability is, as long as it is technically above 0, the event it describes WILL eventually occur given enough time/trials/etc.
I can't see anybody ever interpreting it as a statement about the real, actual, universe. Just like I don't think anybody truly believes that flipping a real coin with non-identical sides (such as every currency coin I've ever used) must have EXACTLY 50% probability of landing on either side. Surely people can separate the mathematical ideal/concept from constraints of physical reality.
> Just like I don't think anybody truly believes that flipping a real coin with non-identical sides (such as every currency coin I've ever used) must have EXACTLY 50% probability of landing on either side.
That's a nice thought, but that's giving the average person too much credit when it comes to probability. In my experience, most people's understanding of probability is very poor. For example, few people truly understand the concept of independent events.
Most people believe that after flipping 10 heads in a row, the probability of tails on the next flip is much higher.
I'm sure you could convince a rational individual that the assymetry of the coin makes 50/50 impossible. But I doubt that the average person has ever really considered it.
> the event it describes WILL eventually occur given enough time/trials/etc.
What's the meaning of writing WILL with capitals, and then saying "nobody is talking about the real, actual universe"? What is the value of certainty about what WILL happen in hypothetical universes?
> What is the value of certainty about what WILL happen in hypothetical universes?
Talking about something that would take greater than 1 googol years in our universe has about as much value as talking about something that would take 1 googol years in our universe.
In other words, the fact that something might probably occur right before the heat death of the universe, rather than after, isn't particularly useful either. For that matter, there's about an equal value in talking about something probably "only" a trillion years out, either.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the infinite monkey example outside of theoretical mathematics; I'm sure someone has, but when I've heard it, it was to describe regular distribution of random.
I think it's a very bizarre thing for these mathematicians to act like they discovered something that I don't think anyone really disputed.
Perhaps not in our observable universe, but in the space of all possible physics that could take place and / or beyond the observable universe if it actually is infinitely big there, perhaps it can? (as in, anything can happen, there will be copies of the Earth with subtle differences somewhere there, Boltzmann brains appearing purely out of quantum fluctuations, etc...)
She doth protest too much. A major purpose of education is connecting the past and the present. There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.
And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason:
> Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.
It's almost as if there are beautiful, deep lessons being passed down by people who lived before us.
I find the authors argument unpersuasive. I was one of those rebellious teenagers growing up and it was exactly in Dostoyevsky and Arthur Koestler and Umberto Eco that I found refuge and companionship. Maybe because they were so different than me and my peers, they offered me a glimpse into different ways of thinking and seeing.
> There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.
It’s this very connection that is at question, however. There is an explicit ideological agenda explicitly focused on severing this connection. The types of people who complain that classic literature was written by “old white men” have never been coy about it.
China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.
Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.
And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.
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