NotAnEconomist

> The key phrase is: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest

> For example, there is social interest (the sort of thing that leads to celebrity gossip).

> These things all have their place, but not here.

I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest or that it belongs here.

To concur:

It's not merely predicated on a utilitarian ethical viewpoint, it assumes that we've accurately accounted for costs of the options (eg, second and third order effects) when deciding rather than merely justifying our preferences with biased models.

Empirically, the second (biased models) happens considerably more often than the first (accurate accounting) -- to the point that even if you're a utilitarian, you have to admit it doesn't work in practice. You simply can't make the required benefit calculations for utilitarianism.

This is something businesses get wrong a lot: their numerical justification is actually a reflection of the biases of their staff, rather than an accurate accounting of the options.

Why would they?

They're not going to have to re-issue shares at a lower price; they're going to get bailed out by the taxpayers.

The conditions for government money should be:

1. All current debt is converted into shares, erasing payback preferences and on-going payments to creditors.

2. Companies must issue new shares as collateral to the government at current market rate, in exchange for the money.

3. Rather than repayment, the government will sell the shares on the open market in years 2-6 (a 5 year window).

4. All share buybacks at the company are banned for a period of 10 years.

It's okay to nationally support critical businesses, but make the shareholders take it in the wallet for their reckless business practices leading up to this.

They took a gamble by buying shares instead of saving -- let them take the hit for losing.

My back of the napkin math indicates that roughly 2x as many people will die in the US this year.

Normal deaths are 2.8M/year.

There's 330M people in the US. At 70% infection, that's 230M people. At 1% mortality, that's 2.3M excess deaths.

That's 80% of the normal deaths for a year; and since other causes of death haven't stopped... we get 180% for the year, or "twice as many".

The RNA-world hypothesis conjectures that life started via a chemical soup developing things similar to viroids.

These early RNA-based replicators would go on to become more complicated, first developing a protective barrier and then specialized organelles.

As a byproduct of that process, viruses developed which could interact with organelles (or just the soup inside a cell) to reproduce themselves without being part of the host "genetic code".

In approximate complexity order:

- self-replicating compound, in solution with precursors

- viroid

- virus

- bacteria

- archaea

- eukaryota

From that perspective, hiding viroids (or similar simple replicators) in comets and boosting them into other systems would be a relatively efficient way to "seed" life around the cosmos.

It absolutely is.

We've seen from CNN and Google that their views don't match society at large, and they're happy to use their positions of influence to "correct" society.

That's what caused CNN's ratings to collapse, and Google to face both a lawsuit (PragerU) and investigation (from Congress).

Did either stop them? Of course not -- they know better than you!

(If anyone wonders why my posts are dead -- it's because HN employs the same kind of Overton censorship, under the guise of policing tone.)