Also, both SLBMs and bomber-launched weapons are vulnerable to tactical countermeasures. Fast-attack submarines do routinely shadow patrolling ballestic missile subs, with a credible intent of attacking and destroying the missile subs if a wartime launch appears imminent. Both bombers and air-launched standoff weapons are vulnerable to interceptor fighters and ground-based SAMs... Whereas nobody has really managed to crack the problem of successfully intercepting a mass MIRVed ICBM attack in the terminal flight phase.

But the biggest issue is that we never really know whether our enemies have developed some new capability (be it technological, procedural, or intelligence-derived) that would critically compromise the effectiveness of a major weapons system. If we put all our eggs in one basket, we become more vulnerable to a catastrophic, war-losing breakdown like that.

It's a very useful skill, and worth learning if you're going outdoors. But it's not as simple as looking at road maps and reading street signs.

Coincidentally, there is a great Sierra Club program in Los Angeles & Orange County that teaches off-trail navigation (among other skills)... It's called the Wilderness Travel Course, and it's great fun. I believe the Mountaineers in the PNW also teach those skills as part of their leadership program.

People have been successfully & safely travelling the wilderness for centuries without these devices. If you have solid wilderness skills, and take appropriate precautions, there is nothing unsafe about exploring the wilderness, with or without a PLB.

In English, the grammatical "possessive" is not only used to mean legal ownership... It can refer to nearly any kind of proprietary relationships:

• "Their husbands all laughed at the joke." • "Their jobs disappeared when the factory closed." • "Their comments are disagreeable and combatative."

The previous poster's use of the possessive was entirely appropriate. I believe your correction was unnecessarily combative and shrill.

The poster you're replying to has already mentioned getting permits to fly near wildlife, and taking appropriate consideration for the welfare of the birds being filmed. It sounds like they're doing a fine job of flying responsibly, already.

Our drug problems are, at root, a mental health issue. And neither will ever be resolved in a society that doesn't understand that both problems are one.

This is terribly wrong information, to the point of causing more harm to people who take it seriously.

The ONLY common addictions that can possibly hurt you physically in withdrawal are Alcohol and Benzodiazapines (Valium, Xanax, Ativan, etc) and a family of related, common tranquilizers). And even then, you have to be a daily user to be at risk of harmful withdrawal... Unless you are actively getting drunk to avoid withdrawal symptoms, you are NOT in this risk group.

It is NOT possible to physically hurt yourself by cold-turkey quitting caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamines, MDMA, hallucinogens, or opiates. You may feel like you're gonna die, but you simply cannot hurt yourself due to quitting these substances. Mostly, you'll just be uncomfortable.

This distinction is REALLY important, because the fear of withdrawal (and life without a fix, generally) is already hugely terrifying to addicts who realize that they have a problem. But many (too many!) of these people have no access to a trusted doctor, and fear judgement, legal consequences, or termination of care if they seek medical help.

Please correct your comment, and stop feeding uninformed myths that have zero medical basis. Educate yourself before you give people any more advice on how to deal with chemical addictions.

(FWIW, I'm not a doctor, but I've spent plenty of time in 12-step meetings, and used & quit plenty of drugs.)

I would have gone with "lupa no grata" or even "lupus non grata" to maximize intelligibility to English readers.

Classical Latin makes up a pretty tiny fraction of the lifetime of actual Latin usage, anyway. It happens to make up the bulk of the written literature that got passed down to modern scholars, but a hell of a lot more people actually spoke various pidgins of Latin, or transitional language as it changed into the Romance languages.

I understand the fact that you believe your opinion is reasonable... It sounds like you also understand that the world broadly disagrees with you. A federal judge (Kimba Wood, no less!) disagreed with you... Since there was no appeal, I'd gather that the guy couldn't find funds to continue his suit--so his backers seem to have disagreed, too.

Is there a reason why you're more willing to believe in the idea that "All these people, including experienced legal minds, must be wrong", rather than "My own layman's intuition about the law must wrong"?

I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand why you'd want to continue backing your POV in the face of evidence to the contrary. I may have missed something, and I'm curious what your thought process looks like.

... Point is, the parent poster is correct... A significant portion of legislatures & jurists believe EULAs to be valid contracts. Not all, but plenty enough.

So if he felt confident in demonstrating that he had financial backers who'd cover the $700k if Pepsi delivered the airplane, then he might be able to beat the check fraud charge. But yeah, it seems like a pretty dangerous gamble to me.

Film & literary theory starts from an understanding of this phenomenon. It's the basis of willing suspension of disbelief. We don't have to try to fill in the gaps with our imagination, when we see/hear/read the corpus of a story... Our minds tend to start playing along, automatically, when prompted.

Plenty of people have proved perfectly willing to entertain the idea of getting wiped out by asteroid or plague... But also, plenty of people have proved willing to entertain the idea that we live in a constructed artificial reality, a la "The Matrix".

Our religious beliefs are just as nutty and varied as movie premises, and that's not a coincidence, because religious beliefs basically emerge from the same mental phenomenon as literature.

I mean, it makes no sense that an invisible Sky-Father supernaturally impregnated a Jewish teenage girl, two thousand years ago, and that the resulting child could reverse thermodynamic processes at will... But nearly 1/3 of the world says they believe it like that, more or less.

"Based on a true story" is not what makes a film plausible to us... We instinctively engage in a willing suspension of disbelief when we're prompted by literature, even when we directly know that the story is false.

Fargo includes that text because the film is an homage to the hardboiled crime fiction genre, which frequently featured that style of blurb on book covers as a marketing tool. But people consume books & films, near universally where we have the means to do so, with or without claims that the stories within are factual.

You've misunderstood what Nicola Morgan is talking about, in that quote. In context, "believable" means that the author's job is to reduce obstacles that get in the way of our willing suspension of disbelief... Empathy, context, proportionality, etc.

See my other comments, re: the David Lynch quote. His meaning needs to be taken in context of some film theory.

I apologize if I've offended you, I'm really not trying to be pedantic, or a dick. I just believe that your intepretation lacks some critical context.

Now, I admit, I'm feeling a little confused, and I suspect that I may have missed something you said earlier.

I think my key point is that the human capacity for a willing suspension of disbelief is totally unrelated to how realistic or factual we believe the story to be... Most of us regularly consume wildly unrealistic fiction that we KNOW is pretty far from reality. Consider Game of Thrones and Star Wars... both massively popular, and neither making any claims of factual realism.

Our social primate brains are wired to be constantly trying to understand each other. We're driven to try to predict the reactions of the peers, mates, competitors, and enemies in our social groups. The details are informed by our own learning and life experiences, but at the core is an obsessive, hard-wired anxiety about what is going on in everyone else's heads.

Literature exploits our internal empathizing behavior by presenting us with depictions (on screen, on stage, in text, etc) of characters exhibiting human-like behavior. In response, our social mind instinctively starts to try to make sense of whatever is depicted. Our minds are drawn into attempting to model what is going on inside the characters, just as if they're normal human beings.

For believeability, it's not really relevant whether the characters physically resemble human beings... We can equally empathize with robots, animals, gods, etc. The important thing is that the characters perform in ways to which our brains can assign some human meaning.

When Nicola Morgan points out that factual truth isn't relevant to believeability, she's talking about the fact that real humans sometimes behave in ways that don't compute, and our empathizing process fails to model them for us.

Does that make sense? Are we actually in agreement here, and maybe I just misunderstood something on your end?

I'd agree that these kinds of dysfunction are common enough to be visible, but I've never seen any actual numbers about the prevalence of this kind of behavior.

The common cause is that these parents have some kind of disordered personality, mostly in the "Cluster B" direction (NPD, BPD, etc)... They tend to display a lot of shitty behaviors, generally, because they lack the self-awareness to change.

I come from a dysfunctional family background. I've spent a lot of time in therapy & recovery, and learned a considerable amount about this kind of behavior.

I'm also aware that my own experience biases me toward seeing this behavior, everywhere. If anything, I tend to over-pathologize people around me, as an artifact of practicing the kind of thinking that I needed to do in order to get better... And my personal sample of observing the human race is pretty heavily weighted toward other people who definitely have pathologies, because I've spent so much time with them in meetings and groups.

It's really common for people with this kind of history to feel like "Everybody I meet turns out to be messed up... All my friends, family, and romantic partners seem to be dysfunctional, too." This isn't an accident, though... Messed up people are drawn to other messed-up people, for a lot of reasons.

Anyway, point being... I have to work to maintain awareness that my personal observations are probably not a fair, random sample of the population. I don't trust my intuition in this regard, because I know that I've been so hyper-focused on it, my whole life.

But I disagree that it's an uninteresting topic. The adult children of these parents are often struggling in their own lives with problems that directly tie back to their dysfunctional parenting.

For those adult children, it's critical to the healing process to come to an understanding that their parents behavior was not OK or normal.

If this isn't interesting to you, personally, that's OK... But then wouldn't it make more sense to just sit out of the discussion, and find another topic to comment on? By dismissing it, you run the risk of coming off as insensitive or disrespectful to the people who do benefit from participating in this kind of discussion.

But if SUV purchases are mostly driven by vanity and comfort, it's much harder to morally justify them.

Also, banning cars completely simply isn't a realistic policy goal, whereas limiting or eliminating SUVs could plausibly get some political traction. Why let perfect be the enemy of good?

But more importantly... Participating in online communities, and caring about one's online presence, is statistically normal behavior for working-age people in first world countries with Internet access... Moreso the younger you get. But the point is, it's massively normal behavior.

So if you tried to use your questions to predict potential leakers, you're just playing the "Most serial killers eat bread" game.

In order for your question to be a useful predictor, it would have to have low rates of both false positives, and false negatives. That doesn't seem very likely.

Our body plan didn't discard this mechanism, any more than it discarded wings or beans. We never had any of those features in our ancestry, because mammals aren't descended from birds. Our most recent common ancestor is much, much earlier than bird ancestors began evolving any mechanisms related to flight or high-altitude breathing.

Earthquake sizes are usually expressed via Richter scale or Moment Magnitude Scale values, which both attempt to quantify the total energy released by the quake. These scales do NOT quantify the force experienced at any particular location, which depends heavily on distance from the epicenter and local geology. For that kind of quantity, you would use a seismic intensity scale (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_intensity_scales).

So it's wrong to say that a quake "...would not be 8 when it reaches Diablo Canyon" because the value '8' is an MMS or Richter value. Instead, you could say that "...the damage potential would be reduced by the distance to Diablo Canyon."

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

In short, it's fundamentally impossible to completely and precisely describe the current state (position & velocity) of any particle. The more precisely you measure one of those values, the more uncertain the other becomes, in proportion.

This is a fundamental physical reality of the universe... It's not just an imperfection of how we take measurements. At a quantum level, the universe is actually random in it's behavior. You can make statistical predictions, which in larger & larger quantity can asymptotically approach certainty, under the right conditions... But at a macroscopic level, outcomes will always reflect some amount of randomness.

By implication, you cannot fully predict the future behavior of a system by knowledge of its current state. This was a tremendous shock to the worldview of many scientists, including Albert Einstein. But over the last century, every attempt to disprove the reality of this fundamental randomness has failed.

It's kind of like saying "All our experiments appear to come up with consistent results, only because God intervenes in all our experiments to create those results." That statement can never be made falsifiable, so it's not a scientifically interesting statement to consider, because by definition it can never yield testable predictions.

That does not mean Superdeterminism is uninteresting... Just that it's a matter of theology or literature, not science.

I gonna stop you right there, pardner.

The first objection to protectionist legislation is that it benefits certain people in our country (the producers of X) by hurting the interests of other people in our same country.

Because you've analogized an entire country as a single person, your analogy is by definition incapable of addressing this problem.

Naively, just ask the producer(s) to put a price number on how much financial benefit they'll receive... And then ask the consumer(s) to assign a price number to their costs. The government compares the two numbers, and if the benefit of protection to producers is higher, our government implements the policy.

Ok, but in practice, the financial impacts of trade policy changes are really hard to quantify, especially in advance. We don't have any obvious, objective signals like public market prices, so you'd have to dig into the business models and accounts of both domestic AND foreign firms. Public filings won't provide the right data, you'll likely need access to the confidential details that underlie their public reports.

Also, you needs to assess the behavior of consumers in response to the new policy, potentially on a mass scale. You need detailed data on historical consumer behavior, plus a prediction model.

Oh, and you need to predict the future of the world economy, how major events will transpire going forward, how foreign governments/firms/consumers will counter your policy... And then model the impacts of all that on consumer/producer behavior.

... Anyway, point is: Humans don't actually have sufficient tools to evaluate the specific financial effects of trade policy changes. Our best, brightest, most well-informed analysts can make some aggregate guesses, but in the real world the analysts are right almost as often as they're wrong.

Hypothetically, IF we had a relatively reliable, accurate ability to evaluate the impacts, we could make policy that way. But we don't, so we don't. Moral arguments that rely on such a capability are just wishes for horses.

Don't get me wrong: I am absolutely in favor of decriminalization, as well as other radical changes in our society's relationships with drugs, mental health, and addiction. But it would be catastrophically naive to suggest that legalized/decriminalized opiates are some kind of panacea.

If heroin didn't exist, these people would probably plain old alcoholics. The damage caused by an alcoholic is pretty similar to the wake of a heroin addict... It's not identical, but the overlap in causes & effects of abuse is pretty similar between the two drugs.

Ultimately, the problem is that some people reach young adulthood without having developed a robust set of emotional coping mechanisms for handling the stresses of their lives. These folks are a LOT more likely to fall into the larger patterns of self-destructive behavior that drive them back toward drugs, over and over again.

I'm not taking about weekend poker players, here... I mean people who've lost their wife, kids, house, and job to a gambling habit. They have zero savings, mountains of debt, and if you lend them $20 to get groceries, they'll go hungry after gambling it away?

Modern video games are designed by highly paid, PHd-level behavioral scientists to be as habit-forming as possible. If you're vulnerable to it, you're going to have the same kind of struggles getting away from video games as a heroin addict would from junk.

The lack of immediately lethal consequences is only part of the problem... Addicts can ruin their lives, and take their families and friends to the point of no return, even without the possibility of something as serious as an overdose.

I understand why people want to focus on legalization of drugs. It's a simple idea, with precedent in th US and many other countries, and it doesn't require expanding goverment spending or power. But it's just too simplistic to be useful. We cannot limit the harms caused by addictive behavior with pure Libertarian self-interest, because addiction IS a self-interested response to larger problems that the addict lacks the capability to handle, emotionally.

If we want to truly reduce the addiction, death, and suffering, we need to develop real, effective social services that help families and individuals on many, many levels. We need to plug the gaps in our children's emotional upbringings, which means permanently repairing the jagged indifference of our society that inflicts so much harm, in the first place.

In short, we need to let go of our fear of collective social welfare programs, and start truly giving a shit about each other.

If this is something you have personal experience with, I'm sorry for what you had to endure, and I hope your life has gone in a better direction.

Video game addiction may not take all your money, but it can definitely devour the person. It'll leave you just as hollowed out and functionlly limited as a drinking problem. It's the core nature of self-medication, regardless of the mechanism of medication.

Or were you trying to make a statement about the statistical validity of the result, because the outcomes differ by 5%? Because that's not how statistics work. A well constructed study of sufficient size can provide detect arbitrarily small differences in outcomes--you just need a bigger study size, the smaller the difference you want to detect. You would learn about this any 101-level statistics course, and a lot more useful information, too.

I can't speak to whether this explanation is correct, but it's better than literally anything I've heard so far.

I see this kind of error pretty frequently, and it's usually not a failure of mathematics... Most often, the person has some pre-existing negative emotional reaction to the stated conclusion, and their brain searches for something to criticize, in order to soothe those negative emotions.

I could only speculate as to why the original poster doesn't like hearing that an existing drug shows promise in treating COVID. Maybe they're a big Ivermectin booster, and they don't like the idea of another drug threatening their favorite?

A cheap, simple observational study like this is merely a first step. No reasonable expert is claiming that this study proves anything worth making medical policy changes over. This study's sole purpose is to establish whether it's worth investing in further studies, or if we can just shitcan the idea now. Subsequent studies will cost more money, and involve larger samples, better controls, and get a lot more scrutiny from peers.

Time and money are finite resources. You have to have some kind of system for deciding where to spend those resources.

This is how medical science works. It's got a ton of pitfalls, but we still do it this way because so far nobody has come up with a better alternative.

OP is asking other posters to do quite a bit of homework for them... As in, "Is this study big enough?" <<YES>> "OK, but how big does it need to be to prove X?" ... At a certain point, it seems clear that OP is not arguing in good faith, because they feel compelled to make the critical statements, first, without understanding the topix.

I would caution you to not extend sympathy to OP's cause, simply because you happen to share a critical eye for this study. There is a HUGE difference between being right for the right reason, vs the wrong reason... and that's how we get crap like Ivermectin for COVID.

The essay you linked is very good, but it's actually illustrating my point... The mouse study ran into bias problems because they had to go and directly measure something in nature, and then turn that into a number. That introduces several opportunities for error.

But this SSRI/COVID study isn't doing that. They're literally just looking at patient records, and counting hospitalization vs current SSRI usage. They're not picking up mice to count ticks... They're exporting records to a spreadsheet, and summing columns.

Now, these guys might have problems with the quality of the records they're relying on... Who knows whether the records are accurate or not. But that's a problem of data quality, not experimental bias.

You might say "Who cares? Either kind of error undermines the results, just the same!" But it definitely suggests that the other guy doesn't know what he's talking about... Because if he did understand stats, he would have used the right terminology.

You're kinda right about one thing, though... I am definitely talking down to OP, and a couple of other folks.

I'm frustrated. There are real problems in how science uses statistics, and it sounds like OP & co have heard about those problems. But the way they talk about this study, they're just throwing crap against the wall to have something to say. They don't really seem to understand the problems they're talking about, or how those problems apply to the study we're currently talking about.

I should change my attitude, and stop taking out my frustrations on these folks. If they're wrong, I'm probably not going to change their minds by insulting them.

But in the short term, the demand for cargo shipping is relatively inelastic. As costs rise, most shipping customers will just bite the bullet and pay the higher fees, because they'll go completely out of business without overseas shipping.

If everyone knew the port cargo crisis was going to be a long-term phenomenon, the shippers would probably invest money in buying more cranes, chassis, etc. to increase capacity. But those capital investments cost a lot of money up front, so they don't make good business sense if you expect the cargo crisis to end relatively quickly.

So far, the cargo shipping companies have just been jacking up prices, expecting that their customers will keep paying... But since they're not sharing the wealth with their drivers, by paying more & investing in infrastructure to improve throughout, they're exacerbating the problem.