lavelganzu

Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scrap of shade. Then it's up to a 30 minute wait for the delayed or canceled bus, then almost exactly a 1-hour ride on the express 801 to go 7 miles to work downtown.

Somehow we combine inaccessibly rare bus stops with speed barely over walking.

The solution, I imagine, requires many changes that are politically infeasible. First, double the number of buses to reduce the wait between them. Second, add neighborhood circulator buses to get people from the neighborhoods to the express buses. Third, either add dedicated bus lanes in congested areas or, in an ideal world, make all congested inner-city roads toll roads, and use the tolls to subsidize buses.

There is a downside of making buses free, similar to the experience of cities which stopped enforcing "turnstile hopping" for trains, which is that it attracts a small number of hostile and malicious riders. An advantage of treating transit as a public good means this downside becomes an empirical question, not a moral one: Which approach leads to more ridership? In some cases, enforcing fares leads to more ridership by increasing safety and decreasing the amount of time spent cleaning up befouled surfaces.

Excellent chart on that page. Hurrah for asking their degree of confidence! The plurality of respondents had low confidence, of course, as scientists should pending some experimental reason to prefer one interpretation over another.

For those who don't click through:

- It's a Nature news feature from July 2025, including responses from 1100 people with papers in quantum physics

- 36% preferred the Copenhagen interpretation, and nearly half of those indicated "not confident"

- 17% epistemic theories, 15% many-worlds, 7% Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave theory

- small percentages for various others including "none"

- additional charts for related questions

They do it by correctly noting that there's no such doubling. Conservation of energy is within-world, not cross-world.

Definitions are for math. For science it's enough to operationalize: e.g. to study the differences between wakefulness and sleep; or sensory systems and their integration into a model of the environment; or the formation and recall of memories; or self-recognition via the mirror task; or planning behaviors and adaptation when the environment forces plans to change; or cognitive strategies, biases, heuristics, and errors; or meta-cognition; and so on at length. There's a vast amount of scientific knowledge developed in these areas. Saying "scientists can't define consciousness" sounds awkwardly like a failure to look into what the scientists have found. Many scientists have proposed definitions of consciousness, but for now, consensus science hasn't found it useful to give a single definition to consciousness, because there's no single thing unifying all those behaviors.

Another option is to fake a planetary magnetic field by placing a large electromagnetic satellite in mars-stationary orbit. Merely reducing the effect of the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere could lead gradually to a much thicker atmosphere, and even surface liquid.

It's a fun idea to explore in fiction, but it certainly didn't happen. The evolution of our species is too recent.

> Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly?

Do regular people ever wax their zippers? (ChatGPT says it might be done by sailors or leatherworkers on occasion, for whatever that's worth.)

At the level of industries and large groups, the chief answer to your "Why?" is the same sort of reasoning as the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": Nobody ever got fired for using established performance metrics.

On the individual level, there's another tricky problem, which is that very few individuals could figure out an alternative performance metric that beats the established one, no matter how gamified the established one is.

On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often this meant the only solution was to apply our own, unofficial code changes!

Incidentally, Blackrock doesn't buy homes. Other private equity, combined, own less than half a percent of single-family homes in the US.

One small trick that would greatly improve headlines of this sort: a number. Compare how these two possible headlines affect you:

- Three Scientists Call for Ban on Social Media and Smartphones Before Age 13

- Thousands of Scientists Call for Ban on Social Media and Smartphones Before Age 13

In this case, it's 3.