The book "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" would be a good read for you, should you wish to consider alternative viewpoints.
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Distilling what I remember about an entire book I read a couple years ago into a HN comment is difficult, but one of the more salient notes from it is this: Adult humans are naturally suspicious of others and slow to trust, particularly those they have no existing points of connection to. In contrast - children have much lower inhibitions in this sense and are much better at this.
Alcohol, in moderation, is one of the most effective tools in humanity's arsenal to more easily socialize with and create trust with total strangers.
The "reduction of inhibitions" we are all aware of in terms of being a risk of making negative choices, also serves to greatly reduce inhibition of the average adult to new interactions and experiences.
It is difficult to achieve this result in adults otherwise, especially in terms of a single activity with low investment required in time, money, facilities, and commitment.
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It is likely that as we transitioned from a society where adult encounters with total strangers were rare (tribal/village) to common (urban) that alcohol played a pretty significant role in creating the social cohesion for it.
It is not at all clear that we have found some successful alternative to this, and we may well find that even with all the documented downsides of it, we're worse off as a society for moving away from it.
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Again, this is my recollection of a book I read a couple years back - don't take this word for word. I will also note that it's not all rosy and has some thoughts on the types of consumption we should probably discourage as well and the general risk/reward of alcohol in society.
Alcohol doesn't create social cohesion chemically. This is a learned effect - there are societies where they had different beliefs about alcohol, and there it doesn't have this effect. This is a really old finding of anthropology. (Of course, in today's global world, beliefs about alcohol get homogenized, so there are ever fewer of societies where they have diverging beliefs about alcohol effects.)
Moreover, it seems likely to me that just like the "relaxing" effect of nicotine, this advantage is "stolen" from daily sober life. If we as a society agree to judge each other less harshly when we're drink, I think we will just naturally judge each other more harshly when we're sober.
However, unlike with nicotine, where the effect is physical and individual (you relax when you get nicotine because you get stressed by physical addiction when you don't), for alcohol it's social and collective. You suffer the negative effect (social pressure to basically be more uptight in everyday sober life) whether you participate or not.
Well on the health side, he might not quite be Steve Jobs level, but he spent months taking complete nonsense "treatments" where his medical condition (predictably) worsened dramatically. That part's certainly a cautionary tale.
Sure, though I'm not sure why that matters as I am pretty sure we all have some sort of cautionary tale in our lives the further back you dig.
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
> If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
In general this is not true, for example if you win the lottery the correct path is not normally to spend all of your money on more lottery tickets.
There are definitely other valid reasons to take unconventional paths though.
Oh yeah, I'm not necessarily saying that it's logically sound, but I do think it's at least understandable. The reason I think that's important is that it's a very human way to respond to experience and especially desperation, thus I find it tremendously unfair that people shit on Scott for that. But maybe this is my bias towards people who are unconventional in their thinking (sans flat-earth and so forth).
I would suspect that the previous poster means something along the lines of: The kind of posts that are so extreme that they're a significant reputational/PR risk to hire. No company wants to be flipping on the news and see their name associated with someone who's openly advocating for atrocities.
Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.
I think the problem with your thought is that it really requires a "stars to align perfectly" kind of thing for that to actually be achieved, especially over the long-term.
Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.
In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).
But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.
Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.
And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.
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Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.
But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.
In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.
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tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.
As someone who's spent a while playing with one (that I didn't buy) and who hasn't picked it up off the shelf in months:
I don't think most users were returning it because they hated the UI or even the device in the usual sense. (There are certainly issues I could detail, but they don't feel like the core problem).
The core problem is just that it just doesn't really....accomplish anything.
Once you get past treating it like an expensive Google Cardboard ("neat tech demo") - it's very hard to figure out what the point of the thing is. What problem does this actually solve for you/what thing is it actually better to use this for than other existing solutions.
Extremely high price tag with no "killer app"/function that makes anyone who tries it "get it" quickly and want one, is a pretty impossible sell.
I don't think that comparison works very well at all.
We had plenty of options for better technologies both available and in planning, 56k modems were just the cost effective/lowest common denominator of their era.
It's not nearly as clear that we have some sort of proven, workable ideas for where to go beyond LLMs.
Loaves of fresh bread are generally in the bakery section of the grocery store. If you're looking for a loaf of bread (often unsliced) that was baked that morning, has a much shorter ingredients list that's often solely the basic traditional ones, doesn't necessarily have any sugar added, and will not keep for anywhere near as long, that's where it is. I'm not promising it'll live up to your standards, of course.
The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.
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I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.
Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.
Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.
Were you actually visiting what Americans would consider a grocery store?
I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).
I do wonder if people are stopping into a CVS or Walgreens and thinking those are grocery stores. In a lot of the rest of the world, a small corner market like that would be a grocer, but in the US grocers are much larger stores.
> I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
But that is the problem isn't it? That you have to drive so far and look on a map to find a grocery store while in Europe you can just walk for 5 minutes and find one where you can buy fresh produce. So in Europe there are these convenient grocery stores that stocks fresh produce and so on, USA not having those is what we talked about.
So sure if you define "grocery store" as a store that sells fresh produce you are right, but then there are very few grocery stores in USA which is still the problem we talked about. It is so much easier and faster to get these wares in Europe than in USA.
That's basically getting into having radically different lifestyles and development patterns and you not liking a car-oriented one. (And hey, I agree with you and live somewhere I can walk to most things, including groceries. But that's not the average American lifestyle).
Approximately 92% of US households have at least one car, 59% of US households have more than one car.
The fundamental point that I am making is: Americans do not typically go to convenience stores to buy groceries, it's not even a consideration. The places most do go to buy their groceries do have fresh produce + meat and so on. They tend to just make less frequent trips and buy more at once.
Since they are getting there by car, it's also easier to buy a lot more at once.
When they get home - they also have a much larger refrigerator + freezer (possibly more than one) than is typically seen in Europe to store it in.
(To preface: I am strongly in favor of renewable energy overall).
To the extent that there is anything real to their dislike:
Poorly structured/overly generous homeowner net metering initiatives, especially for solar without storage, legitimately have escalated costs for everyone else in some regions.
The excessive subsidy given to those homeowners for power that's often not very valuable (as it comes primarily at a time of day that's already well supplied) comes from somewhere, and somewhere is....the pockets of everyone who doesn't have home rooftop solar.
And those people are typically poorer people in rented, denser housing than the average homeowner.
Most places have been moving to correct this mistake for the future (ex: CA's "Net Metering 3.0"), but that also gets pushback from people who wanted to take advantage of that unsustainable deal from the government or who incorrectly think it's a part of general anti-renewable pushes.
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Aside from that, in regions known for production of coal/oil/gas or major processing of, it's seen as a potential threat to jobs + mineral tax revenues that are often what underwrite most of their local/state government functions.
While there are plenty of job creation claims for renewables, it doesn't take a genius to see that they don't appear to need all that many workers once built, and that the manufacturing chain for the solar panels or wind turbines is probably not to be put in places like West Virginia, Midland TX, Alaska, etc.
My comment doesn't imply that at all. We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).
We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained.
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Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest.
Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low.
With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves.
> We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).
Maybe not literally everywhere, but almost everywhere would continue to benefit from more solar even if it's lacking storage. Despite the duck curve.
> We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
It's a bad way to do a renewable subsidy, but we do want some kind of subsidy and flawed is usually better than nothing. I'd prefer replacing the subsidies with a carbox tax but that is not going to happen.
Per the FlightRadar24 logs, it looks like only about 45min was wasted over Prestwick, not 2hrs. First approach was around 18:06, and they're breaking off to head for Edinburgh by about 18:51.
If there's considered to be a mistake here though, I'm guessing it's going to be spending too long before committing to the initial diversion.
Without knowing the weather they were seeing at the time, seems hard to say if they should have gone for a closer 2nd alternate than Manchester.
I don't think we know yet when min fuel was declared. At that point, they will be resequenced. Then we need to know when mayday fuel was declared. It sounds pretty odd, like perhaps there were multiple simultaneous situations and the crew did not have adequate information.
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Distilling what I remember about an entire book I read a couple years ago into a HN comment is difficult, but one of the more salient notes from it is this: Adult humans are naturally suspicious of others and slow to trust, particularly those they have no existing points of connection to. In contrast - children have much lower inhibitions in this sense and are much better at this.
Alcohol, in moderation, is one of the most effective tools in humanity's arsenal to more easily socialize with and create trust with total strangers.
The "reduction of inhibitions" we are all aware of in terms of being a risk of making negative choices, also serves to greatly reduce inhibition of the average adult to new interactions and experiences.
It is difficult to achieve this result in adults otherwise, especially in terms of a single activity with low investment required in time, money, facilities, and commitment.
--------
It is likely that as we transitioned from a society where adult encounters with total strangers were rare (tribal/village) to common (urban) that alcohol played a pretty significant role in creating the social cohesion for it.
It is not at all clear that we have found some successful alternative to this, and we may well find that even with all the documented downsides of it, we're worse off as a society for moving away from it.
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Again, this is my recollection of a book I read a couple years back - don't take this word for word. I will also note that it's not all rosy and has some thoughts on the types of consumption we should probably discourage as well and the general risk/reward of alcohol in society.
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