tic_tac

Assuming the WHO stash has not already been depleted due to the global spike in cases, the number of WHO tests available to the US is probably insufficient to be helpful for its over 300 million people. Incentivizing the private sector to create tests on the other hand does have the potential to get enough tests for the whole population.

This is a global pandemic and there are many other affected countries around the world that do not have the ability to ramp up testing production the way the US does. Poorer countries should be the ones with access to the emergency test kits, not the US.

Is 79°F hot?

Alive is just a word. It means different things to different people and any formal definition will necessarily be arbitrary.

This should be its own post on HN! Great story.

So if there is superdeterminism, meaning positions are absolutely determined, either there is minimum scale in the universe (discrete universe) or somehow the universe computes with infinities.

Both are absurd concepts! When probing the ultimate depths of reality like this there are no good answers.

This is a snide and irrelevant comment.

But ratios only express rational numbers, if we had to express location in a 3D continuum it's almost guaranteed that it would be represented by an irrational number.

It is extremely frightening, and it's important that we continue to fight for freedom of expression on all platforms.

Unfortunately so many have an innate bias against the US that any criticism of it is considered fair game regardless of how conspiratorial or absurd.

I understand that if we posit a super-Turing machine in which arbitrary positions on a continuum can be maximally expressed as finite values what I am saying does not logically follow.

However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically impossible. In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

It's not a matter of computability though, it's a matter of exact precision not being physically possible in a continuum.

If superdeterminism is true, it appears to imply that the universe is discrete at the smallest scales. Were the universe continuous, 'definite' position would be impossible, meaning that certainty itself would be impossible. Everything would be 'fuzzy' meaning superdeterminism would be impossible.

The comment I replied to was saying that the lack of testing was indeed a political issue with one side at fault.

You can't just conjure the necessary tests up from nothing. Japan has also had problems with testing. No one is trying to "deny testing". It is a work in progress and is indeed ramping up.