bell-cot

I'd guess the #1 motive is trying to stay relevant as an authority on moral and moral-adjacent issues. Then #2 is to alert the faithful (and trying-hard posers) to the official Catholic position…

Yes, infamously so.

So... Germany decided, back in 2011, to completely shut down their nuclear power plants in 2021 & 2022. Now - after 10 years of the plant operators carefully planning for that (longer-term mainte…

Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky ...from a quick skim, I'd say he believes WWII to be the only justified war that the US has fought in the past century. So…

My n=1 - At $Employer, we had a prospective vendor who insisted on payment via Zelle. Made a quick "what should we know about Zelle?" call to $Employer->Bank. After a few phone transfer…

"Common sense" does not apply - or is worse than useless - in areas where one has no actual deep experience. Which in this case would mean certain virologists, epidemiologists, etc. Simple …

The important part: > ...the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer. [em…

Link to the original paper, which seems accessible (at least with js disabled) - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... (It's far longer, with …

In any vaguely medieval setting, a tower is a conspicuously high-status abode, with both "loner" and "don't mess with" vibes. Whether looking down at us from a window, or up …

That's far easier to do (lower power needed to cause major damage) against satellites which have optically sensitive parts pointed toward the Earth. Starlink satellites probably don't. And …

Rather than deconstruct whether Elan's tweet is an ivory-tower Truth, or talk about a few (very specialized, niche) alternatives...maybe his tweet should be interpreted as an "urgent persona…

Video is of an event on Monday (Feb. 28th) evening...but it's "big picture". Most of the material is effectively current, well-done, and obviously important. And the speaker seems like…

My guess is that you want [more|less|different] coverage here of the war in Ukraine. (Like slater, I've heard nothing about any "adjustment in HN moderation posture".) Rather than hint…

tl;dr - Physically need them? "It's complicated". Psychologically need them? Yes.

+10 (if I could), and similar for a metric crap-load of articles appearing in paid-staff newspapers, magazines, etc. It's like a bunch of folks who have never actually watched a football game d…

I meant to be ambiguous, and start an interesting and wider-ranging discussion. I was, at best, modestly successful No one seemed interested in the "what might be done, within existing resources…

Yes - but how many high-class (social or economic) parents would fight hard to get their kids into schools with bottom-percentile per-pupil funding?

A Modest Proposal: Replace some of the "Gifted" schools with "Mature" schools. The former implies higher-than-average per-pupil spending. For the Mature schools, spend substanti…

My experience is that the manager seldom knows enough to judge usability - vs. merely not giving a crap. Especially not usability when in production - on well-loaded servers, via the lower-end work…

> Along with Russian billionaires, Sweeney also has started tracking the flight paths of planes and jets owned by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. > Last week, he launched @PutinJet... Eve…

The top comments on HN are usually more succinct, informative, and insightful than the linked article. And nobody dies wishing they'd spent more of their life reading mediocre web pages.

Some better questions to ask - based on both histories of the U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear chains of command, and well-known rumors that Joseph Stalin was murdered by his inner circle: 1.) If …

This +10 (if I could). Africa has ~3 times the land area of Europe (and that's measuring Europe all the way east to the Ural Mountains), ~60 different countries, ~1,250 languages, and ~1 1/4…

And Constantinople is not Istanbul. The point ant6n made (grandparent post) was about the worldview of the (roughly) conservative old Russian nationalists who are dropping the bombs, and how much des…

+10 (if I could). For those less familiar with the role of Kiev in Russian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

NO - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines (Admittedly, the article is in American Military News. And thinking about and being ready for situations wh…

+1 and ditto...but my bet is that such honesty would not turn out well for Patreon. "Per our Terms & Conditions..." is a legalism which excuses their behavior, keeps the discussion safe…

Would you be satisfied if they just came out and said "Patreon is a small financial services company. Not black-ops mercenary outfit. Not a powerful nation state. If you expect us to face down…

For shorter-duration service, in a limited area, without problematic wind/weather patterns, and without high-latitude winters (long nights) - yes, drones are superior to satellites. But scaled u…