While it will benefit travelers, it’s likely to be used by a large number of people as an economic necessity - travel for work, study , selling and buying goods and services. The combined net economic impact is what I assume the govt hopes will offset the inflation burden to some extent. Covid transmission on the other hand is essentially endemic at this time and we have to manage it, rather than try to prevent it, especially in such a globalised world as ours
Given how notoriously unreliable even the IC and ICEs have gotten over the last few years ( i rarely travel but the three times I tried, the train was either substantially delayed or worse, canceled) , this is really a good deal.
I know. I was so disappointed when I found out I wasn't the first person who deduced this from Everett. I still reserve the right to explain it in my own off-brand way.
The part about fewer paths going forward, and what that implies about longevity and loneliness, is mine. I didn't get into my corollary, which is that the limitation of (un)consciousness in future dead paths must exert a reverse time pressure on present events.
Yeah if birth rates stay low ( which they have now for a few decades esp in Western countries but true elsewhere), you’ll need either large scale immigration or lots of cash to service the social care system, which now has to service the growing number of the geriatric and chronically il
Even visiting the place as a tourist left a bad taste - everything is made up, the service industry is mostly unfriendly (our sightseeing bus left us stranded somewhere and then later on the desert trip, the car broke down middle of nowhere and the driver had no other help so we had to help him fix it), no public transport to speak of, fanciest cars on one side and hapless labourers trudging in the heat alongside. Apart from the choice/variety of food, I cannot think of any redeeming feature about Dubai.
I've never been to this country but I've been to Vegas once and I somehow expect the whole experience to be very similar and to attract the same kind of people
Sorry to hear about your experience. Mine was wildly different, and I came away with entirely opposite impressions of their service industry.
> no public transport to speak of
How did you manage to miss all the huge flashy light rail stations? It was really convenient to use for travel throughout the city. Especially as a tourist -- just about all tourist destinations are close to a station.
I (re-) developed a strong fascination for Physics last year after chancing upon Feynman's QED lectures. It was such mind-boggling stuff and I realized that that was just one level at which nature behaved in utterly magical ways (think - cosmological scales, the question of gravity, unified theory etc).
After trying to scour and even reading many books in this area, most that are either highly abstracted for the 'pop-sci' reader (like me, with no training in physics) or were all-out textbooks, I chanced upon Susskind's lectures and the Theoretical Minimum series. I started off right from the basics and IMHO, it has the right balance between introducing concepts and making sure you internalize them by having you actually work on problems (highly recommend that you don't skip these). I am nowhere near close to understanding any of this yet but it gave me at least an orientation for what to expect and how to prepare. Once I get a bit of time and the interest back again, I expect to go back to the other books in the series.
I've seen this news shared through various forums at least 5-6 times and not once did I think it's an actual dinosaur embryo! Sure, science reporting, especially the headlines in mainstream media, can be much better but I'm not sure that's the case here
You didn’t, but millions of people when they see the headline on social media. Still don’t think it’s a bad title though, just would be nice if we could guarantee people read the actual articles when we know most don’t.
Many clickbait articles include both a clickbait title and a clickbait picture. The picture included in the article gives context to the meaning of perfectly preserved.
Many social media platforms allow the picture to be included in post. This article wouldn't be clickbait on one of those. This is only a problem on platforms like HN.
Google is up to so many sneaky things, it's stopped surprising me to find out how they're always one step ahead to make their products even more intrusive.
A new one I found out is their supposedly open-source initiative called 'Cloud Information Model' [1]. Along with others such as Salesforce, Genesys and AWS (companies that I personally don't trust), they promise 'you can create seamless and tailored personal experiences across cloud-native applications'. It's all a bit vague and fancy and sufficiently "tech-y" to impress the marketing folks but colour me suspicious.
Not sure about morality but yes it’s unethical and borderline illegal. If an elected body is planning legislations, actively blocking it means you’re suppressing the voice of the public and the voters.
> If an elected body is planning legislations, actively blocking it means you’re suppressing the voice of the public and the voters
This is reductive. When the Congress was writing cryptocurrency reporting rules, the crypto industry asking for clarifying amendments (to avoid classifying miners as exchanges) wasn't suppressing anyone's voice. It was supplementing it with specialist knowledge.
If the legislation, as worded, applies to cars on race tracks -- probably? I think these metaphors are getting far afield.
Privacy is a fundamental thing that's more important (and harder!) to protect than most things.
It's probably also a good idea to get a breadth of stakeholder's opinions on an issue. Lobbyists definitely have a massively outsized portion of this breadth.
Even if it’s a decision that I don’t agree with, if we all agree democracy is the best form of representative government, the decision taken by the lawmakers has to be respected. It’s not optimal, it’s slow to effect changes but I still believe it’s the best form of government we have.
They're not "actively blocking it" any more than someone holding a protest outside of the Capitol building is. The difference is that they have lobbying money, which is allowed and generally encouraged by the congresspeople themselves. Any consumer regulation that directly targets an industry is more often than not a call-to-action for the lobbyist to dedicate more of their budget to the lawmaker(s) in question.
Because the purpose of a govt is to make laws for everyone. The tyranny of the majority is just tyranny in the end (this is what authoritarian govts, ironically, fail to understand about democracy...debate and disagreement seems weak and decadent to them, it is not, I think that US politics has relatively weak controls on lobbying but the perfect outcome is not a ban on lobbying...most successful authoritarian govts operate by claiming to represent the voice of "the people"). And btw, this is how US politics is designed, the people who created the US constitution were very aware of how democracy ended the first time.
