Any system will have people who aren't performing well, and some fraction of those people will be tempted to cheat. Cheating in this case doesn't provide any indication that the system is broken.
This is a broad generalisation without supporting evidence - not sure if this helps improve the quality of the discussion. Can you substantiate your statement further?
The idea of a lab leak could either mean that legitimate research was happening on this virus and it got accidentally leaked, or that the virus was being prepared as a bio-weapon and was intentionally or unintentionally released. The reason I think those scientists disavowed the lab leak theory initially was to avoid confusion between whether COVID-19 was an intentional bio-attack by China as many believed then and was pushed by Trump.
The two actions people can take are:
1. Delete Facebook apps, Whatsapp and IG. This can have low to high utility loss for you, but has negligible effect on Facebook. It would have a bad effect for me, who has many family members and friends connected on whatsapp and needs whatsapp to connect to anyone whom I meet in my country.
2. Lead a movement to switch away from these apps. This has an insanely high overhead, and requires significant organisation of people and a large individual commitment. This would have a significant effect on Facebook.
This is how I view the problem. This is not an example of people being unwilling to act on their ideals. It's a situation where acting on their ideals would cause them a significant burden with no effect, and causing the intended change would require ridiculously large effort.
The modern Indian state takes a lot of its iconography from the Mauryan empire, most prominently the Lion Capital of Sarnath (image is in the article). It's super interesting to hear about this technique which was instrumental in producing these capitals.
You're right. Macs have excellent build quality and are durable as hell. Planned obsolescence with Apple is seen more with iPhones. There was the recent story about Apple slowing down older iPhones via software updates [1]
I had the same impression, it's not like there are a limited number of rungs of wealth. Furthermore, I doubt that rich people believe that supporting higher taxes will have an immediate effect in ensuring 'usurpers' don't get rich - it will probably take a few years to come into play.
The most confusing aspect of this is the fact that taxes are often progressive. Increasing taxes would then definitely hurt the wealthy more than the usurpers. This aspect of Hoffman's argument didn't make much sense to me.
I liked the picturisation of the different planets and of course, the time dilation effects. I think they're great for a general audience, who may not be exposed to the latest developments in astronomy.
I'm wondering about how this impacts criticising the school. If the school does X, can the school punish students for discussing this action and criticising it? Feels like this allows schools to crack down on criticism.
I see this as an attempt to implement a programming paradigm (i.e storytelling) that's radically different from existing paradigms. How are others interpreting this project? What's it's significance?