There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed.
The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercount as the page claims but not by that much by probably a couple orders of magnitude.
A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract.
The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless you censor topics that attract cranks, you'll eventually become a qanon platform (or the equivalent) and drive out all worthwhile participants.
I'm not sure what the global rule is called, but something like volume nonlinearity or kookiness asymmetry it something. If you have a bunch of looks everyone else leaves. You're options are to get rid of them or fail. It sucks but there it is.
Ultimately wouldn't these rates be set politically? As in, there'd be one politician who says "raise the tax and do this" and another who says "lower the tax and stop doing that" and voters just pick what they want to happen.
Another key factor is enforcement cost. Enforcing a land tax is really easy for a government. You just... Go there and get it. There's no moving the land offshore or having complex relationships or offsets. If someone won't pay the government just assigns the ownership to someone who will and goes on.
Compliance costs with many other taxes are quite high.
That's kind of the thing that makes APIs possible, right? It sounds to me like "what if programming were done in a completely flat global namespace in which abstractions, encapsulation, and structure were impossible."
No. An API specifies more than the name of the function. It will specify the arguments, their types, the type of the return value, and at least informally, what the function does. You can change the underlying implementation without changing the API. That's the whole point of an API. The problem with current API technology is that the informality of the spec of what the function does. That allows some aspects of the behavior of the function to change without triggering any warnings.
By having the linker work on hashes of implementations you eliminate that problem but create a new problem. You can no longer change the behavior of the function because you can't change the function. That means you can't suddenly change behavior that some caller is counting on, but it also means you can't fix bugs without changes in the caller.
Reading this now, I'm imagining all the horrors of static linking but applied to every function instead of whole modules.
Maybe the simplest solution is to allow the function to change to the new version, but make it easy to revert in the event that something breaks. This of course means that you can't make the names of the functions their hash (without lying, preventing the runtime from checking that hashes ways match, or modifying emitted bytecode or native code to do what you want), it has to be an orthogonal layer on top of them like types (as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread).
I think the theory is "there are few enough we didn't notice."
There's other weird effects going on -- some countries that look really really similar have vastly different experiences with the virus. (Canonical example is DR and Haiti, although the situation is dynamic enough no-one knows if that'll last.)
My takeaway from the difficulty in measuring this thing is that there is pretty high variance in transmission. Some carriers spread it REALLY well. Some carriers spread it poorly. With a lot of variance it matters a ton to figure out what is the deal with high-transmission situations. My take so far is we have some clues but no certainty. (Seems to spread in public transit and healthcare environments more rapidly, but slower than you'd expect in schools and prisons.)
It'd clearly be a gigantic win in terms of intervention policy to understand this better, and we simply cannot do that without extensive contact tracing so we know what's going on. They're doing a pretty good job of this in China, HK, Taiwan, South Korea. As nearly as I can tell we're doing a dismally poor job in the US and Europe.
You read papers that have diagrams of restaurant tables and bus seating charts from China. In the US it's hard to get stats on aggregate nursing home vs non-nursing home fatality rates. Maybe it takes some time for these papers to come out, but I don't see evidence that high-quality pre-pub contact tracing data is being relied on to develop policy responses.
Some friends and I were hooked on this game in college. We eventually wrote a program to solve particularly tough hands. It turns out there are a few potential hands that are actually impossible to solve, but not very many! It's a fun programming problem. :-)
From the discussion on this I've read, I think a good direction would be to consider statistical tests like this as simply not "publishable" at all the way we currently think of it.
That is, if you have a theory about how a Gene relates to height on tomatoes, and you do a test, that test would show you you're likely on the wrong track if it falls below some p value, but the only thing it tells you by being above is that "there may be something here."
I think this is true for many fields with a replication crisis. The problem isn't statistical, the problem is no theory. If you have a functional theory there's all kinds of things you do to gain confidence in it, and mostly those will contribute to the ability to predict statistical results, but that is completely different on kind than sending out a survey and noting that question 2 and 6 are statistically correlated.
When a field thinks that the kind of early suggestive work like this is worth talking about, they should probably just talk about it in conferences and similar venues, rather than "publish" it where journalists will pick it up in a "science shows" story that 95% (lol) of the time turns out to be wrong.
In other words, I think it is fine that fields talk about early non-theory results -- that can be interesting for specialists to advance faster. "Publishing" this mostly-going-to-be-wrong stuff is leading to confusion among the public about what the scientific process demands and how trustworthy it is. That is not a good outcome in my opinion.
Are you suggesting the Chinese market is more competitive due to the government being big enough that companies in the market have to exist in an impartial regime? This isn't the impression I get from many other sources.
I don't think any government is impartial, but you're right. That seems like it's the idea. In theory, it's much better to have the government be the big man on campus. You really don't want to live in a place where corporations are more powerful than the government.
This relates well with the gang model of politics, where the government is merely the biggest gang. It is an interesting way of looking at political systems because it encompasses such a range of scales.
A local coin/stamp person was completely uninterested in my old stamps from like 35 years ago. I think the shrinking number of collectors is outstripping the number of collections getting thrown out, and the whole idea of collecting stamps is just fading away.
Yup it is exactly that. The big problem, in contrast with precious metals, is that stamps have basically no intrinsic value. They're just pieces of paper. At least with precious metals, the coins can be melted down to create high technology.
The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercount as the page claims but not by that much by probably a couple orders of magnitude.