Thanks for the link. His decades of tech columns were so well-served by his skeptic curmudgeon style. There's danger in bringing that persona to all topics, I now see, shown by this regrettable chapter of his blogging life.
I'm glad this worked for your family, but in my kids' experience this is too heavy to use as balance bike. By the time they were comfortable hoisting their de-pedaled 12" / 5.4kg bike off the ground, they'd nearly outgrown it. They preferred a cheap hand-me-down balance bike which was half the weight (the upscale ones with brakes and pneumatic tires are self-defeatingly heavier).
Just as ChatGPT is now called "Chat" by the kids (go ahead and finish grinding your teeth, I'll wait...), if Antigravity takes off then it'll get an irksome nickname like Antigrav or just Grav.
The quote you've selected is an unfortunate example of the NYT poorly summarizing the findings of their own study (not your fault, they're the ones who wrote it). You can find a more precise explanation at the end of the article in the Methodology section.
"200 to 400" is from their model of decreasing hood height for existing collisions. But from the article:
> There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.
It doesn't appear that NYT included in their model the larger blind zones and how that causes more collisions. So they shouldn't have said their 200-400 estimate covers the increase in vehicle "size" when it only models one dimension of size growth.
In the 70s in SF my father had his car window broken by someone who wanted to steal his parking space. He found his car pushed in front of an adjacent driveway, and ticketed.
$9B/yr is less than half of the Pentagon's more recent estimate of $2T through 2088 for the F-35 program (according to Wikipedia and its sources, which is all I have to go on).
And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.
I think the only one lying here is Gwern for calling the NYT liars. Gwern's claim is that by discussing someone's vape-induced injury in an article about flavored nicotine vaping, NYT misleads, because they are different vape product lines. The implication is that there cannot be an honest reason to mention the injury in this context. I disagree (as does the injured teenager, according to her quote in the article). I think it could also be understood as explaining that teens who enter the vaping market by way of flavored nicotine also have more exposure to the illegal products that caused the injury.
Gwern's evidence that NYT succeeded in their deception campaign is... riled-up internet commentators in the comments section who think vaping is evil. Which doesn't mean much because [pardon my cheekiness here] a) every comments section on every article everywhere on the internet is full of riled-up people, and b) we all know no one reads the article before commenting, therefore these outraged commentators must have developed their opinions without the aid of the NYT.
> Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.
If you're the type of person who checks the comments on a post with this kind of headline, then you probably also want to (re-)watch the 2 minute highlight reel of Mark's backyard meat-smoking party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak
Israel violated the 2024 ceasefire over 10,000 times [0], not counting all the ones since Feb. 28. I guess this time they're not satisfied with having only 50 "freebies" a day.
> or just ignoring the laws, and illegally reporting from dangerous yellow or red zones
I skimmed Wikipedia [1] but couldn't find any mention of laws in Ukraine that forbid reporting from certain areas. I see laws forbidding statements of support for Russia, and laws enabling censorship. Maybe I've misunderstood: are you referring to anti-trespassing laws in general, and not specifically about reporters?
No, this is a different strike. Please read the NYT article you linked more carefully.
> The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.
Another situation where bad actors benefit. From the article:
> What really interests Cian, who has published research[1] exploring how audiences tend to have less trust in media outlets that are transparent about their AI use, is the fact that the Post disclosed its use of algorithmic pricing at all. “If you ask people [whether they] want transparency on what’s behind your pricing strategy, people say ‘yes,'” he says. “But what we found in my research is a paradox, in the sense that people think that they want to know, but once they know, the reaction is worse than not knowing.”