progressdeveloper

Ben came up with this question. These sorts of issues of balancing privacy and personal rights with public safety etc. are always interesting to me. Scenario: you are unconscious on the sidewalk. Someone calls 911. Paramedic goes thru your pockets to find your ID. In so doing, he finds "something" (illegal drugs, a gun, whatever). Can what he found be used against you? Short answer: YES. You can think of it the same as if you were walking past a police station and happened to drop a bag of meth. Cops could absolutely nail you for that. It would NOT be OK if the paramedic were going thru your pockets on the request of a cop, or against your regained-consciousness wishes, or under otherwise "non-medically required" circumstances. I wonder what protocols the paramedic folk have for going thru someone's wallet. Hopefully they are robust. --- Now you can extend this question to MD's. Suppose you go to your MD with some weird injury which causes him/her to realize...

The most interesting Economist articles are often buried deep and relatively short. One that caught my attention this week is a California ballot initiative to apply a one-time 5% tax on the wealth  (not income) of anyone who has more than $1B. Superficially, I like this idea: I have no problem, in principle, with taxing the shit out of billionaires and, broadly speaking, I don't buy that it would destroy incentive to create new businesses etc. Specifically, though: - a one-time tax sounds like a terrible idea, period. - fixating on a specific number is populist nonsense - doing it in CA only doesn't make a lot of sense. Doing it across the US makes a lot more sense. I expect many more people would move from CA to TX than would move from US to Europe - it does not solve the major problem of valuing assets - it seems unfair to tax paper gains that might disappear, without a mechanism to recover the tax paid (although - I am also onboard, to some extent, with "boo-fuckin...

I am enraged but also genuinely curious about this: I googled for a while and I could find almost nothing about what this guy actually said. It was all just vague accusations of hateful speech, which is obviously open to interpretation. That's what I'm curious about. Let's see some quotes! That said: there is no doubt that Barry Neufeld did a lot more than "express the view that there are only two biological genders". That's what I find enraging about this tweet. So, f*** John Cleese for implying that BC is a left-wing hellscape. That said: surely you should be allowed to express such opinions, assuming they don't cross a line into "hate speech", in the same way that no matter how pro-immigration you are, opining that someone else questioning immigration quotas is automatically a xenophobic racist is way offside. That said, it's easy to believe that Barry Neufeld is an asshole. Maybe JC is cancelling because he doesn't want to come to a p...

Ben and I have been playing "which countries/cities start with the letter ...", which comes from our mutual interest in GeoGrid, which is a Wordle type daily game thing based on that type of question. Behold, the miracle of AI: The fun part is that in this response from Gemini, many of the entries including A B D do not add up: the list of D's actually has 9 items in it, not 10, and so on. I'm sure it knows how to drive a car, though.

Sometimes I think my admiration for The Economist, and how much I depend on it for my world view, is going up at about the same pace as the number of things they say that I disagree with or have trouble believing. Last week they had one of the most interesting articles I have ever read about inequality. The TLDR is that while it's beyond debate that pre-tax inequality has risen sharply in the last two decades or so, after tax inequality has barely budged. In other words, governments have done a decent job of tax and subsidies. They had all kinds of statistics and graphs supporting this belief. Here's one: This is showing that spending by the 1% is actually less than spending by the lowest 50%, since the late 1990's. Well, that's great and all, but it kind of glosses over the fact that rich people still spend around 18x more than poor people, on average, or, that spending is just one part of the picture. Graphing income would, presumably, look much less favorable. The ac...

We went to see Brent Butt, of Corner Gas fame, at Just for Laughs Vancouver last night. This is the third time we have done so. 10/10 would recommend. He's hilarious, and, crucially, 99.99% family-friendly, a critical factor with my spouse. Also, tickets were fairly cheap, around $40 I think. --- The countdown to Australia has begun. Our flight leaves a week today at 10 PM on Sunday night, arriving in Sydney around 9 AM on Tuesday. A friend sent me this video explaining what looks like the bonkers technique for executing a right turn (equivalent to our left turn) there. AFAIK, it's just in Melbourne, which makes it even more of a WTF. https://share.google/0uK9slcyY3DJhfoi8