Mme. Grégoire Trudeau seems to have contracted the novel coronavirus in the UK, so your datapoint doesn't really suggest anything about the situation in Canada.
If you're looking for rooms with high activity, I put together a list of the top 30
busiest IRC channels I'm in by sorting my logs by size (descending) [0].
Addendum: kichimi on rizon.\#rice has just reached out in response to this comment:
2020-02-15 06:55:32 kichimi that post
2020-02-15 06:55:35 kichimi was made by you
2020-02-15 06:55:40 kichimi and i wanted to say hi
2020-02-15 06:55:45 Seirdy hai
2020-02-15 06:55:51 kichimi because i love seeing rizon repped
2020-02-15 06:56:00 kichimi but you didnt put a disclaimer in your post saying rizon was the most toxic network on the internet
Your argument is not supported by data. The NHS and Canada's universal healthcare systems have been around for decades.
Yet there is no evidence to suggest the factors you describe have ever been part of the public discussion in those countries. And the US is the country with the most draconian drug laws in the Anglosphere.
It sure is supported. The NHS will delay or deny surgery to people if they are tobacco users or above a specific BMI. This was a pretty big debate in the UK a couple years ago. Crazy thing is this was motivated by cost cutting, not concerns about the success of the surgery.
Canada led the way in making smoking much less attractive, more so than the US. High taxes, large warnings - the govt had a strong incentive when it’s footing the bill.
The Canada numbers include teenagers (persons aged 12+) while the US ones do not (persons aged 18+).
Also, the Canada numbers went from 13% (lower than the reported US rate) in 2015 to 15.1% (higher than the US rate) in 2017. That 13 to 15.1% increase over two years seems to be a statistical anomaly as it goes sharply against the overall trend (according to your source):
"Despite the overall prevalence increase in the most recent survey year, from 1999 to 2017, the overall trend was an average annual decrease in prevalence of 3.2% of the previous year’s value"
TLDR; the average over the last several years is more or less the same.
Nations are highly complex systems. All the different 'parts' interact with one another to some extent. Thus when you double a nation's size, the number of interacting 'parts' will exponentially increase. All of these interactions can pose potential problems, or opportunities, but what's clear is that you can't linearly extrapolate one nation's experiences across nations of different sizes.
>Thus when you double a nation's size, the number of interacting 'parts' will exponentially increase.
This doesn't sound right at all. Why would the number of interacting parts increase exponentially? And why would that result in decreased economic efficiency rather than increased?
Doesn't this very idea run counter to one of the basic tenets of capitalism that "bigger is better" (due to economies of scale)?
>what's clear is that you can't linearly extrapolate one nation's experiences across nations of different sizes
Maybe true, but IMHO not at all for reasons of economic size. That is, all other things being equal, increasing the size of an economic system should make it more efficient, not less.
As a result, lots of recent work is being done in the algebraic setting (rather than analytic), where the foundations are on much firmer footing.
Being algebraic symplectic is a much stronger condition than analytic symplectic, but is still interesting enough (and, for geometry related to linear algebra problems, as is often relevant in CS, is not a very strong restriction at all.)
To me, the criticism of the Science review that this book offers no alternative paths forward is very strong. This is because when blundering around in the darkness to find truth, there are no good algorithms.
If you could tell a high energy theorist a better algorithm to find good problems to work on, they would listen. But if all you can do is point out that their algorithm is suboptimal: well, sure. Of course it's suboptimal: we know, we just have no better search algorithms in physics-theory-space.
Woit and company seem really invested in smearing high energy theory in front of popular audiences. A book-long `look at the fact that this algorithm is really slow!!!' is a sigh-worthy addition.
It's well acknowledged in the field that SUSY, string theory, etc. are very incomplete ideas. No one is saying they have the full story, and I don't think anyone expects to have the full story anytime soon.
So what have people been doing?
1) People have been expositing our `best guess' theory, which /is/ string theory. We have really good tests of quantum field theory, and really good reasons to think that `the most natural' generalisation is string theory. We're not cocky enough to claim that string theory /is/ the generalisation, just that it's a really good candidate and isn't it worth spending a vanishing fraction of GDP to explore it and see how good of a candidate it really is?
Like, an incredibly larger amount of money is spent on innovating ways to get people to look at advertisements. It doesn't seem like there is a high bar to pass to justify the existence of studying this stuff.
Of course, a lot of effort goes into finding better guesses. Supersymmetry has been under the gun since the LHC turned on, and tons of effort has been and is spent thinking about the alternatives.
Supersymmetry just remains a strong enough idea in comparison to the alternatives people have proposed that people think it's the best idea to explore. And as time goes on and supersymmetry looks weaker and weaker, more people do spend time looking for good alternatives.
2) People have been using tools from string theory to tell us about ordinary quantum field theories. Dualities like ADS/CFT are huge right now.
Lots of really good ideas have come from high energy theory in recent years. ADS/CFT is a string-theoretic duality which teaches us a lot about statistical mechanical systems, things that definitely are testable. So string theory has been testably productive, as applied to the study of quantum field theories and statistical mechanics.
3) Also, the idea of topological quantum field theory is a recent innovation of high energy theory, hardly fully explored, and has been hugely important for modern mathematics.
I disagree that that is a fair criticism, that a person shouldn’t criticize the state of “physics” as a professional practice if they don’t have better solutions.
I read Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics,” covering similar terrain, and his book was not presented as a work of science: it was rather a book about the sociology of science, and how the structures in place controlling the resources for research were going astray, by continuing to support, professionally, work in areas that were not proving fruitful, and limiting resources that might go towards finding new solutions.
Lost In Math sounds very interesting, as the author has decided to speak with leading researchers about their work, at a time when the validity of that work is being questioned.
I've worked jobs with such a disparity. For a govt census job, the top two workers out of 20 visited 3x the dwellings per hour and had a ~4x success rate per dwelling compared to the average, so they were literally doing as much as the other 18 employees.
They've almost certainly been just nicer people who people liked to communicate better. Like, young pretty girls with pleasant voice. And they knew how to build right approach to people. That's it, and it can't be trained.
In fact, current elite US college admissions seem to select for people who vote Democrat well enough. It would be hard to increase that percentage very much. Just look at the political affiliation reported by e.g. Harvard students. If anything, I would think that an institution which tested for wisdom might shift conservative a percentage point or two.[ Not because I think conservatives are necessarily more moral in the US; but because I think more conservatives are religious and churches teach the language of virtue, which probably at least better tells you what the 'right' answer on wisdom tests is, whether you live that answer or not.]
liberals and academics have tended to pretend values or virtue don't really exist while following the principles themselves. they tend to heavily participate in their communities, get married, and have kids later and don't commit much crime. However, they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that these behaviors are virtues or that anyone else should behave that way. the only way they really enforce their concept of virtue is forcing people to accept certain things about sex and gender.
> liberals and academics have tended to pretend values or virtue don't really exist
No, we liberals (academic or not) jusr disagree with conservatives (who tend to share values, again, whether academic or not) on some details of what good values are (and, equivalently, what constitutes virtue.)
Disagreeing with your values is not the same as pretending values don't exist.
> However, they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that these behaviors are virtues
I know of no liberals who would disagree with the idea that community involvement and not committing crime (provided just definitions of crime) are virtues.
Marriage is a different story, but then even many strands of socially conservative Christianity (such as traditional Catholic doctrine) don't view marriage as a general virtue, but rather as a virtue specifically for those with a vocation for it, a vocation which is no more inherently virtuous than that for either religious life, priesthood, or committed (lay) single life. It's true that liberals often see additional lifestyle choices as no less virtuous than these.
I don't think I've never pretended virtue doesn't exist. And, to be frank, most of the liberal types I know, regardless of their (a)religion, believe there are virtues.
Entropy is not due to the equations of our universe, but rather the initial conditions. So the asymmetry might be apparent but the equations might still be symmetric. Related is the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Of course, we don't have time symmetry in the equations anyway because of the weak force. But because the weak force is weak//doesn't matter much for the physics of many systems, we can often write the equations of physics as a time-symmetric term which essentially decides the motion plus a very small time-asymmetric term. So we can deal with the small term using techniques like perturbation theory, and use time symmetry for the rest.
> Of course, we don't have time symmetry in the equations anyway because of the weak force.
Could you expand on what you mean here? I've expected for a while that there was going to be something non-time-reversal-symmetric with the weak force, on the basis of parity violation (space-reversal doesn't give you the same equations) plus relativity (space and time are the same thing, at least kind of). But getting there directly from parity violation might require a faster-than-light frame of reference to observe it from, which is... let's just say it's experimentally difficult.
The answer, as you point out, is that CP violation implies T violation. Experimentally testing T violation is much, much harder, and I don't think has really been done in many systems (look at Fitch and Cronin's work for an example), but we know CP violation implies it. So it's there. Or at least, to our best knowledge, it's there -- T violation is not very well understood.
