astalwick

If a child or a teacher at a school caught covid, the entire class was fully quarantined for a minimum of 14 days and two negative covid tests were necessary for anyone in that class to return. Classes were kept fully isolated from one another, and children had to wear masks in class for a significant part of the year.

No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.

What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.

It was possible in other countries.

My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave.

Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the extent possible. As a result, schools were able to stay open.

We've decided to solve that problem by consuming very nearly the entire residential power consumption of Canada, a country of 38 million people.

We've done this with a network that can process 400k transactions per day (at $20/transaction in fees), as compared to visa, which does 150 million per day.

Surely, we can do better?

Bitcoin currently consumes roughly the energy used to power one quarter of CANADA.

I'm optimistic that there is a better way to store a ledger as you describe. Perhaps a database?

It's not about removing human agency. It's about nudging the aggregate views of a whole population, ever so slightly. Determine what works, reinforce that, repeat algorithmically.

He's making the point that Facebook has the ability to apply machine-learning-like reinforcement algorithms to whole populations.

You or I, individually, still have agency. Large populations have inertia - they're slow to move - but I'm not sure they have real defense against this kind of manipulation. I guess the real defense here is a diversity of sources (but we all know people who get all of their news from [fox | cnn | facebook | whatever]).

> However, don't forget that when a baby is left unsupervised and is submerged in a pool for 15 minutes, it's called neglect.

Whoa there, slow down.

Kids are quick. One moment, your three kids are happily watching Finding Dory on the tv, while you're making dinner. The next, only two are: the third has quietly wandered off.

Unless you know the particulars, be very careful about tossing around words like 'neglect'.

We removed the youtube app from our iPad, because our 4 year old was starting to get too deep into these.

There's a lot of great stuff on Youtube for kids (genuinely, whole-heartedly, terrific stuff; I was amazed), but there's also a lot of very, very weird and sexualized and violent content. Targeted at young children. And unfortunately, the 'recommended' sidebar is a little bit too eager in sending kids down those paths.

I see some comments comparing it to 'video games ruining society' and 'violent cartoons'. No, it is not at all the same thing. I have no problem handing the ipad to my son and allowing him to select a show on Netflix. Youtube crossed my 'wtf creepy' threshold a few too many times.

You may be right.

However, the Volt is basically just a hybrid with a bigger battery. By 2011, hybrids were pretty common, so being nervous about the tech wasn't as much of an issue. That's the point I'm trying to make: for most people, $30k is a pretty big investment. New tech is a risk, and awards like COTY go a long way to overcoming consumer resistance to that risk.

It's possible, though, that Tesla has done enough to prove out electric cars. Tesla won COTY as well.

This is a big deal.

Car of the year, when you're talking about normal internal combustion cars, doesn't really matter that much. When you start talking about new (and, for $30000, scary) tech like electrics and hybrids 10-12 years ago, it makes a big impact on purchasing decisions.

I bought my 2005 Prius largely based on the car of the year recommendation on the 2004 Prius (among other research, sure). That recommendation helped validate that I wasn't buying an experiment - people who know cars thought this was a great buy.

I'm so not surprised by the comments here, so far.

The core points here are good ones:

- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.

- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.