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1 Aug, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Washington Post experts reinvent calculus! Image
Experts say descending elevator will continue to descend before it rises.
A bunch of Washington Post reporters who majored in English grasping for a way to explain that the pandemic is still getting worse, but not quite as quickly as it was before.
The Extreme Value Theorem states that if a function is continuous on a closed interval [a,b], then there will eventually be massive blowout savings on big name brands storewide. Washington Post, call me! I am expert.

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30 Jul
No one ever mentions that McCain was shot down while bombing a civilian target in a densely populated city. The secretary's tribute here to what has become an American military tradition is fitting.
The targets McCain and his fellow airmen bombed had no military value; they took place hundreds of miles from where American soldiers were fighting. The purpose of the bombings was to inflict suffering on civilians severe enough to put pressure on the North Vietnamese government.
If in 1967 North Vietnam had bombed a power plant in Oakland we'd consider it the greatest war crime since Pearl Harbor. (There was in fact a nice short story based on such a premise, but I can't remember the author's name).
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
30 Jul
There was a window of opportunity to make mask-wearing as apolitical as handwashing, but we missed it. And once an issue gets its coattail in the woodchipper of political polarization, it's all over. The process is social media driven, but how to mitigate it is our great crisis
The tendency is to blame "partisan politics", but people have always been opinionated and combative about political beliefs. It's the process of runaway polarization, where any issue fractures on party lines once it passes an internet event horizon, that is new and frightening
Dropping a brick of heroin on every doorstop would probably have been less damaging than giving people an always-on device that communicates news about the world through the people who matter most to them. But we YOLO'ed our way into this world, and now have to YOLO our way out
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
28 Jul
The Biden administration wants a billion dollars to begin to process Afghan citizens eligible for evacuation. This comes out to $50K per applicant, or about $40K more than airfare to the US along with a few grand to tide them over while finding a job. cnn.com/2021/07/26/pol…
Biden wants these Afghan heroes who helped us detained on military bases for reasons I still can't understand. The refusal to just grant them temporary resident status and welcome them into the United States is not just immoral and asinine, but is costing us money.
These special visa applicants are Afghans who speak English, understand America (kind of by definition) and are on track to become US citizens. At what point do we stop treating them like dangerous criminals, and let them settle with their families and send their kids to school?
Read 5 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
25 Jul
Banning cryptocurrencies is a foolish idea; all we need to do is regulate the exchanges.
If people insist their play money is real, then make them do time in the real-world pokey for breaking any of the rules that govern doing stuff with money. It's a similar strategy to making your kid pay rent and utilities if they insist they be treated like an adult.
Banning cryptocurrency would only reinforce the cult's belief system. We should take advantage of the fact that the technology is completely unworkable, and let it die a natural death. Regulating the exchanges will protect civilians while the fanatics get their wiggles out.
Read 7 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
23 Jul
Klobuchar's bill would make online companies liable for users who post misinformation about public health, in a year when public health authorities have done multiple U-turns on what is true. It would be a windfall for lawyers and serve no public interest. wsj.com/articles/bill-…
The bill would give the Department of Health and Human Services de facto censorship authority over social media, exposing anyone who defied HHS guidelines to predatory lawsuits. If such a law were proposed abroad, we'd correctly identify it as an attack on freedom of speech.
All you have to do is remember back to summer 2020, when systemic racism was asserted to be a public health problem commesurate with covid, to recognize how quickly such a mandate would expand in all political directions, changing with each election. This is how censorship works.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
18 Jul
The spyware scandal in the news today is a chance to reiterate that human beings are incapable of producing defect-free software at any scale. In particular, there is no such thing as a secure online system or a secure mobile platform. This foundational issue won't go away.
Our main line of defense against malicious software is that human ingenuity is also limited, so we only find a fraction of our errors. And the malefactors go on to make more mistakes coding the malware. Incompetence is the great defensive wall securing most of our infrastructure.
The phone situation in particular is dire, and I hope we see a future where these all-in-one devices are supplemented by simpler machines that do just one thing (make phone calls, send text messages) and can't be turned into a 24/7 surveillance beacon by hacking an emoji renderer
Read 10 tweets

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