richardthered

Nobody is proposing to remove the infrastructure itself. It's a question of who gets to decide who gets to _use_ the infrastructure.

Imagine that you have a private company that manages all of the toll roads in a city. One day, this company decides that they no longer want John Smith to use their toll roads. John Smith is banned.

Maybe John is a terrible person. Criminal convictions, DUIs, whatever. Regardless of that, should a private company have unilateral right to ban a customer? With no recourse? No appeal, no accountability? There is no elected official to vote out of office if you don't like it. There's no appeals court to hear your claim. John is just banned. He now has to drive an extra 30 minutes every day because he can't use the high-speed toll roads to get to work.

Parler is problematic. For sure. And I'm a big believer in free speech, and that companies, in general, should be able to run their business however they want.

However, there are limits. A sandwich shop can't refuse to serve a customer because they are black, for instance. But cake shops can refuse to serve customers if they are gay, as we recently learned from supreme court cases.

I think that much of the issue here revolves around how much of a monopoly a company has. If my local sandwich shop doesn't want to serve me, because I'm a jerk, that's fine. I can just go to another shop down the street. I'm not that inconvenienced.

But these massive tech companies have enormous ecosystems. They dominate their industries, and are often the only really viable choice in their markets.

I see a constant stream of article about YouTubers that build a massive business with millions of followers, and then one day 'poof', Google kicks them off, and they have no recourse.

Or the guy on Facebook that spent $47 million dollars in advertising over the years, and one day Facebook kicks him off, banned for life. No recourse, no appeal, no explanation, even.

Apple and Google have absolute say over their app stores, and what is allowed. Companies can be ruined overnight because some algorithm tipped from the "ok" to "not ok" overnight.

This is troubling.

Anecdotes are data. Quite literally. Each is one data point. A data point is not a conclusion. To draw valid conclusions you need a large body of data. But each anecdote is, quite literally, a single data point.

In general, I think that having knowledge of multiple different tech stacks is good. The IT industry is constantly changing and evolving, and learning to evolve and change is good.

Also, you might want to take a look at Flutter. It's a new(ish) cross-platform mobile development framework from Google. It seems to be getting some traction, and allows you to write truly cross-platform mobile apps. There are other cross-platform mobile frameworks (React Native, ...), but Flutter seems to be gaining momentum.

Anyhow, if you are interested in mobile development, give it a try! It's not you are locked into your choice for life...

Login fatigue. Yes, I use a password manager (1password). But it means I need to stop going through the sign-up flow, jump over to the password manager, create a new login, change the password recipe from random-letter to random-word (which I prefer), generate a password, then go further modify it to accommodate the site's particular password complexity rules (upper/lower/special/numbers), add the URL, save, then go back to the sign-up flow to finish.

And... 90% of the time, that's what I do, because I prefer to have separate logins for every site.

But sometimes, I just click the 'sign in with google' because it's a hell of a lot faster and easier.

Most people don't want to manually update code and patch their speakers. They want to push a button, and get music. Not run a local IT department

Firstly, I don't see how she has any legal obligation to pay for the medical care, at all. Your friend didn't get the medical care, her father did. Unless the father is a legal dependent of your friend, she isn't responsible for his medical expenses, at all.

Secondly, it sounds like you are making assumptions about her overall financial status, based on what you know about her current salary.

She might have substantial student debt, medical debt, spousal debt, be upside-down on a mortgage, have other family that she is supporting financially, etc.

Just knowing someone's salary doesn't provide a very clear picture of their overall financial status.

I think what you get out of a book is more about the person reading it, and what they are looking for, than it is about the story itself.

Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go" could be read by one person as just a whimsical children's tale. Someone else, though, might see it as an interesting allegory on the journeys that a person might face in their own life.

Likewise, I might look at a squirrel burying nuts in the ground, and see just a squirrel. But a buddhist monk might derive some great wisdom from watching the very same thing.

It's comedy. Most sci-fi and fantasy novels are serious, so having a comedic bent is unusual, which is interesting.

Beyond that, though, comedy itself can be interesting because it looks at life from a different perspective. Much of comedy is based around the idea of looking at the mundane aspects of life, and getting a fresh perspective.

Why do we drive on 'parkways' but park on 'driveways'? etc.

We have governments, and bureaucracy in our daily lives.

What would that look like if you extended that concept to an intergalatic civilization? You'd have a race of bureaucrats that end up destroying our planet to make room for a new construction project.

It's common for sci-fi stories to focus on the fantastical and awe-inspiring aspects of the story, like teleportation and faster-than-light travel.

This, however, focuses on the mundane aspects of life. Yes, there are fantastical elements to the story, like 'improbability drives' and such. But the focus of the story is on the banalities of life. The daily quirks and joys and annoyances that affect us all.

Arthur Dent is dealing with local red tape, and the local pencil-pushers try to destroy his house to make way for a highway. His universe then grows dramatically as he learns that there is a vast universe out there, teaming with intelligent life. And guess what? He's still stuck dealing with bureaucrats that want to destroy his home.

Life isn't always about psychic powers and laser guns. Sometimes it's just about crushing on a girl that you like, and having her run off the with asshole with a better ride.

That's an interesting story, even if the asshole has two heads and the 'ride' is a spaceship.

Without some kind of efficacy standard, you could sell water as a cancer cure. That would be very bad for health outcomes.

However, I do agree that it's a difficult topic, in general. Off-label drug uses is one example.

There are food allergy tests that you can take, too. I've done the ALCAT test, and it was very helpful. It's a blood test, and provides a big list of red/yellow/green foods.

e.g. Red = likely to cause a strong negative reaction.

I found it to be extremely helpful in finding things that were causing issues.

Kale, Cumin, etc. Things that I would not have easily identified on my own.

The problem with forcing someone to reveal a secret (e.g. a password), is that ultimately, there's no way to prove that someone actually knows the password. If I say that I forgot the password, and a judge throws me in jail for contempt of court, I could rot there forever. There is absolutely no way for me to ever prove that I truly forgot the password. You can't prove a negative.

With fingerprints or face scanning, neither of these is an issue. You put your fingerprint on the device, or you scan your face.

So, I think that forcing someone to reveal a secret that is purely in their head is fundamentally different than compelling other forms of access (physical keys, fingerprint scans, face scans, etc.). The physical access methods can be verified to either work or not. That's not true for mental secrets.

> The current drug regulation regime strikes me as backwards--it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful

The problem with this approach is that it would lead to a proliferation of snake-oil salesmen.

If the effort to create a new 'drug' is trivial, but the study on efficacy/harm is long and expensive, then there would be a huge number of snake-oil offerings.

Take colored water, slap a 'it cures cancer' sticker on it, and start selling it the public. In a couple of years, once there are studies showing that it's just colored water, and does nothing, just shut down the product and make a new one. The regulatory/safety efforts would never be able to keep up.