8456523

>This drop is largely caused by deaths of despair, partly related to a lack of affordable health care in the US

I'm curious whether you believe lack of affordable health care in the US causes a lot of death from diseases of despair; and if so, why you believe that.

I always thought that health care is relatively ineffective at preventing death from those diseases -- addiction in particular, but also suicide. In other words, I always thought that the solution to this particular epidemic will require more than just allocating more money to health care.

Also I always thought that most of those dying from diseases of despair do not suffer from other chronic illness, e.g., diabetes, that health care is effective at treating. And I always thought that among those Americans without a pressing current need for health care, simply not having access to good affordable health care, although bad, is not bad enough on its own to drive a significant fraction to suicide or substance abuse. In other words, I always thought that the despair has another source, e.g., a lack of friends or a lack of feeling integrated into a community.

>A 2 day standoff for a shoplifter seems like a huge waste of city resources and taxpayer dollars.

Correction: a 2-day standoff for a suspect who when chased by police, barricaded himself in someone else's home with a gun.

If that is how he acts when under observation by the police, what does he get up to when he thinks he is not being observed?

>It was peak America mostly for straight, white, Protestant men.

>It was not peak America for gay people. Or for blacks. Or for women.

It makes me sad how often discussion of any particular social question on this site gets derailed into a discussion of identity politics.

In 1950, Americans owned 75% of all the cars in the world. Surely, black Americans owned cars at a lower rate than white Americans did, but they probably owned cars at a higher rate than whites in Sweden, France or the UK did. The point is that there are major influences on prosperity that cannot be reduced to the same old identity-politics tropes.

Almost all modern jet engines have (ducted) fans. In planes that never go supersonic, e.g., all current commercial airliners, the fan provides most, but not all, the propulsion. And the only difference between a fan an a propeller is how many blades it has. (The presence of a duct around the fan does not change anything basic.)

But even if they did not have fans, there is no fundamental difference between using a propeller or fan to speed up the flow of air and heating the air inside a chamber to speed up the flow of air. (The fan is used because at subsonic speeds it can be made more efficient.)

In other words, all 3 means of propulsion work by conservation of momentum.

Canola oil looks good on paper, but there is something very unhealthful about it if my experience is any indication. (I have to eat well or my chronic illness gets worse almost right away.)

I avoid most seed oils, e.g., safflower, sunflower (regardless of how the seed oil is grown or refined) but canola is the single oil I take the most care to avoid. I use olive oil almost exclusively.

I don't have a decent theory about why it is particularly bad for me. Sorry I can't be more informative.

If it were as easy as bootstrapping a retail food business by buying or renting a few food trucks, someone would've done it already. Food trucks are not exactly new.

(The reason for my earlier mention of bias is because those that haven't understood that usually believe the obstacle to be systemic bias.)

Aren't you worried that such a startup will run up against the same systemic biases that have been preventing poor minority neighborhoods from accessing healthy food at reasonable prices for decades?

In other words, food truck entrepreneurs have been around for decades, so why doesn't the service you imagine exist yet? Because so far no one with the right motivation, i.e., no one with their heart in the right place, has tried what you imagine?

Just because there are peer-reviewed scholarly articles making an argument does not make that argument correct.

I hope anyone who suspects they or someone they love has chronic lyme will dig deeper than just reading scholarly review articles. A professional scholar tends to write only about things that they anticipate will advance their career.

In particular, I hope anyone who suspects chronic lyme will meditate on some of the comments on HN written by people who claim to have recovered from chronic lyme or what they suspect was chronic lyme. If you search the web for information on chronic lyme you will encounter a lot of material by people who make a living trying to persuade various segments of the public in one direction or another. (Some of the professional persuaders have MD after their name.) On HN comments in contrast I am satisfied that almost all the substantive comments about chronic lyme are currently not written by professional persuaders.

>Being on an empty stomach also seems to help

There might be microbes (bacteria) in your gut (intestines, etc) that produce toxins that dull your thinking when they have food.

This comment sits at -4. Can someone who thinks it should be downvoted explain why? I ask because I want to learn (not to argue).

That's not true.

It is difficult for humans to estimate how they spend their time, but my guess is that I've spent at least 35 hours recently exploring Windows 10: Changing various settings, installing software, asking Windows-specific questions of Google Search.

And I'm writing this on Windows. (Except for the Windows-specific questions, I'm not counting web use in the estimated 35 hours because of course the web mostly works the same way across the desktop OSes.)

I think computer users vary drastically in how much they value predictability in the software-based systems (or "environments") they use, and that I value predictability much more than the average user does.

I realize that it is unreasonable to hope never to be surprised at the response the system makes to an action of mine. But my response to being surprised is to try to understand how I could correctly predict similar responses in the future. For example, I might try to understand the reasoning of the designer of the part of the system in question. Or I might search for ways that I might have misinterpreted the situation. And I don't like it when I never reach an understanding of the surprising response.

Its source code's having half a million folders is a sign that Windows will never stop surprising me, which, all other things being equal, makes me less hopeful that spending time getting to know Windows will pay off for me.

Life of course will never stop surprising me. But to have any hope of getting anywhere in life or achieving any goal whatsoever, my brain must be sufficiently reliable and predictable. I see my computer as an extension of my brain that helps my brain be more reliable in the ways that will help me to succeed.

If you see your computer or the web site you are interacting with as a potential friend with agency of its own, then I can see where you might be offended by my original comment. I see computers and web sites as tools. Levers, if you will.

> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders

I would be more inclined to switch to Windows if its source tree were smaller.

My guess is that a big reason I prefer MacOS over Windows is that Apple has been much more willing to drop support for legacy hardware and old applications to keep the source code more manageable.

>A small aircraft is mechanically simpler than a car

Maybe so, but the consequences of a failure of the design or the implementation are much higher.