Octokiddie

> The Guardian-Harris survey also found that 49% of respondents think the S&P 500 index is down for the year. In reality, stocks have been ripping: The S&P 500 is up 13% this year on top of a 24% gain last year.

This is kind of interesting. It would be more interesting to know how that misperception has changed over time. I suspect that at any given time half of people wouldn't correctly guess whether the S&P was up or down.

1. Flood the higher ed market with low-quality federally-guaranteed loans.

2. Witness the explosion of enrollment in low-quality colleges and universities.

3. Notice the spillover effect of (2) into every corner of higher education, in the form of higher tuitions everywhere.

4. Watch as (2) leads to ludicrous debt burden on college grads.

5. Wring hands about out-of-control cost of college, leading to higher demand for loans.

Rinse and repeat year after year.

What would happen if federal student loans were phased out across the board?

Nuclear weapons are all about posturing. Both sides know the consequences of detonation and do everything in their power to avoid it. Thus posturing.

> Microservices are the Wrong Answer

The author never states the question. This makes it impossible to evaluate the answer, which presumably is stated in the title. The article would be much stronger with a clear statement of the perceived problem that microservices solve and why modules are a superior solution.

Oddly enough, I predict the final destination for this train will be for moving images to fade into the background. Everything will have a dazzling sameness to it. It's not unlike the weird place that action movies and pop music have arrived. What would have been considered unbelievable a short time ago has become bland. It's probably more than just novelty that's driving the comeback of vinyl.

A few points of note:

1. This doctor is widely-described as a pathologist. So it seems unlikely he would have developed any cancer treatments as a lead investigator.

2. It's much more likely he was part of a team that developed treatments, and that his was a supporting role.

3. A quick glance at Google Scholar indicates work on multiple approaches to melanoma treatment that Scolyer had some kind of role in. The article doesn't say which one was used.

4. There is no "cancer-free" in glioblastoma. Pieces of the tumor always remain after surgery, waiting to grow back. This is part of the reason there is no cure.

5. MRI cannot detect remnants as in (4).

6. Median survival is roughly 12-15 months, so being alive at this point is not in itself much of an indication of success. Three years would be more interesting. Even three years of "clean" MRIs would be more interesting.

This story keeps getting trotted out, and the journalists doing it fail to acknowledge these points. It's an extraordinarily complex disease that does not lend itself to feel-good stories. If it does get squashed into that box anyway, the result is misleading at best.

Breast augmentation could be one case.

Google is an advertising company. Relying on them to do anything other than service that business seems risky at best given the abundant history of rug-pulling. Even then, at this point I'd be questioning the support for ads. Support can mean anything from customer support to not running the business into the ground with blunders.

The article hints at, but doesn't really nail the strong associations between music and our past that develop as we age. The older we get, the more listening to old music takes on the role of time machine, teleporting us to an earlier time where we can forget all the bad parts, leaving just the good.

Strangely enough, the same thing can be said about cars, and even software.

Any insights into what makes this culturally acceptable?

For those complaining about the presentation, Safari's "Show Reader View" works well. Also supported on Firefox. On Chrome, it's complicated.

The irony is that when you know the result is on Reddit, it's far better to use the Reddit search bar. It's not even close. More than that, I've found myself just going to Reddit search rather than Google. Ditto StackOverflow.