Should point out this is not the first time the BLS came under serious fire, politically. When the Republicans regained control of the Senate in 1995, they set up a commission (Boskin commission) that said inflation had been overstated, and henceforth cut Social Security cost of living adjustments.
Readit NewsStopTheWorld commented on The BLS can't be replaced by the private sector bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/petethomas
StopTheWorld commented on Big Data was used to see if TCM was scientific (2023) mcgill.ca/oss/article/med... · Posted by u/mgh2
In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won by Tu Youyou.
During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help.
One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.
StopTheWorld commented on Michael Madsen has died nytimes.com/2025/07/03/mo... · Posted by u/anigbrowl
Can't forget his appearance at the beginning of the classic hacker movie, WarGames.
StopTheWorld commented on C. Elegans: The worm that no computer scientist can crack wired.com/story/openworm-... · Posted by u/noleary
Oh sure, because neurons totally get a free pass from determinism, right? They're obviously powered by tiny wizards flipping quantum coins, unlike boring digital computers just mindlessly following rules. Newsflash: neurons and digital computers both have to play by the universe's stubbornly deterministic rules—it's all just matter wiggling predictably, with neurons simply doing it in a squishier way.
> flipping quantum coins...Newsflash: neurons and digital computers both have to play by the universe's stubbornly deterministic rules
I don't really understand what this means - you obviously know at the smallest level things happen by random probability - because you mention the quantum world - but then you say the universe is deterministic.
> Is there any evidence of any tribes whatsoever existing over 20,000 years ago?
Hunter gatherer tribes.
> There was no tribal violence 47,000 years ago because there were no tribes!
Unless you are arguing semantics, yes there were. Tribes and tribal violence.
> Hunter gatherer tribes
Hunter gatherer bands. There's no evidence of any tribes 20,000 years ago.
> Unless you are arguing semantics, yes there were. Tribes and tribal violence.
There is no evidence of any tribes existing 47,000 years ago. Insofar as tribes, and tribal violence, the OP mentioned them, which is wrong in that time frame, semantics or not.
Take a guided tour with Clinton from Ngurrangga Tours as you travel through the Murujuga National Park. With the highest concentration of rock art in the world, rediscover the petroglyphs (rock art) created by the Yaburrara (Northern Ngarluma) people. The rock art has been dated back to before the ice age ended and is approx. over 40,000 years old and there is up to 1 million rock art images scattered across the entire Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago.
As you venture down the creek at Deep Gorge, surrounded by huge granite boulders and Currajong trees, marvel at the petroglyphs etched into the rocks, and gain an appreciation of the Jaburara Tribe’s self sufficient lifestyle. Shell middens provide evidence of their seafood diets; the granite boulders would have offered shelter from the harsh weather conditions; and the creek, now mostly dry, would have been their only water supply.
And all the other aboriginal sites across Australia that are older than 20,000 years.
And the sites tracking back toward Africa that line the human expansion outwards.
What kind of world do you live in that has denied you access to evidence of early human existence?
> What kind of world do you live in that has denied you access to evidence of early human existence?
I didn't say humans didn't exist 20,000 years ago, I said there was no tribal violence. There's no evidence the Jaburara were organized as a tribe 40,000 years ago, although later on that may have happened.
Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and third places outside of the consumer setting are becoming extinct because they are non-monetizable.
This last category, non-consumer third places are formerly the domain of kid-friendly community-building activities. When we talk about creating more of these and the response is, "they aren't economically viable," it's exactly the kind of economic calculus framing that I'm talking about.
Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ).
In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school.
In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).
> For anyone curious, there is absolutely no evidence of coordinated violence between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens [0]
'coordinated'.
> and it is believed that war developed during the Neolithic when well defined territories became more important.
What about simple tribal violence?
> If it was just "to the victor go the spoils" you'd expect a mix as sometimes one side would win and sometimes the other over the thousands of years.
Two examples refutes your assertion. In the US/Canada/Australia, the natives won a few and yet the male native lineage has been effectively wiped out. Almost all the interbreeding between the europeans and natives was between european males and native females. Mexico is another example. About 65% of the male Y chromosome is european while almost 100% of the female lineage is native. Mexico never experienced whole mass european immigration like the US, Canada or Australia. With only a tiny spanish population, over 400 years, the spanish male lineage has come to dominate mexico.
> The evidence is much better explained by only male sapiens-female neanderthal couplings producing fertile offspring, which is a common thing for hybrids.
Except that modern homo-sapiens completely displaced the neanderthals. If it was simply a matter of innocent hybridization, neanderthals would still exist as they breed better with each other than hybrids do. Not to mention most animals have an innate aversion to hybridization. It only tends to happen as a last resort in the wild.
> What about simple tribal violence?
Is there any evidence of any tribes whatsoever existing over 20,000 years ago? All the evidence points against it.
There was no tribal violence 47,000 years ago because there were no tribes!
StopTheWorld commented on Share of total health spending, by percentile twitter.com/cremieuxrecue... · Posted by u/black6
That is a statistic on one chart on that. For only those who are 65 and up, total spending of the top 1% drops to 17%. In the charts posted, from the ages of 19 to 44, the amount spent on women is much larger than on men (not sure why - obstetricians?)
Then of course, some people get cancer and some do not. With a normal age distribution of 18 year olds and up, it isn't surprising to me that very little is spent on the 18 to 30 year old men, and that one of the 65 and over got cancer and a lot of spending went toward that.
StopTheWorld commented on Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there? · Posted by u/zer0sand0nes
They're probably 2-3x the guy running a local plumbing business doing remarkably fewer hours. And of course it's more accessible. The average guy running a plumbing business is probably 30 something, while people can hit 300k at faang a year or two out of college with like one good promotion.
I worked with a guy who went to a public university - not a top 25 public university but in the ballpark. He was hard-working, smart and "got it", but he wasn't at the level of some super-geniuses I met coming out of school. He worked with us (Fortune 100, non-FAANG, non-tech, non-big metro) as a junior SWE for a year and did not get promoted as he desired. He jumped ship for a FAANG-adjacent company after a year working for us, and his TC jumped from <$100k to over $200k. Two years later he was promoted to senior and his TC is now over $300k.
He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.