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We also don't understand how some drugs work, either (e.g. Tylenol).

I'd say we have a rather good idea about the mechanisms for pain relief from paracetamol. Even Wikipedia has a decent summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Pharmacodynamics

A utility-maximizing drug discovery system would, I think, devote some effort to biological experimentation on healthy humans, giving them chemical probes to see how that affected their biology. As is, ethics requires we get this information accidentally, for example from that famous recreational drug chemist who gave himself Parkinson's Disease with a botched synthesis that made a highly neurotoxic chemical. And some of the information comes from drug trials. A useful drug is not the only value obtained from a drug trial -- each trial is also a test of a hypothesis about the mechanisms of a disease.

One of the books of the "Colossus" trilogy (about a computer that takes over the world) had the computer doing this sort of medical experimentation on randomly selected drafted subjects, with the idea of maximizing overall utility. It shows the problem with utility maximization as a goal, similar to the requirement that people give up a healthy kidney if someone else needs a transplant.


It's no myth. The bank will keep the money in many cases by claiming you were negligent. You have no recourse.


My 80 yr old mom had her atm card stolen. The guy withdrew close to 5k in small dips over a week. He had the pin, so my guess is he watched her enter it then distracted her to swipe the card. Bank refuses to cover it, despite her reporting it immediately on discovery. They claim if he had the pin, then she was negligent, and they are not responsible.

This presumably happens regularly, as the guy's con was very practiced and slick and he knew exactly what to do to maximize the payoff. But the bank didn't pick up on the obvious pattern, and evades responsibility by blaming the victim.


Ask yourself if you'd be willing to painlessly end your life, if given the option. Most people prefer to keep on living, which is strong evidence that on balance, despite all the bumps and grief of living, life is still pretty awesome.


I'm not advocating suicide or anything of that form.

I'm asking, why should the majority of the world have kids given that life is largely a struggle and in so many places of poverty an extremely difficult one?


Because in a poverty situation, where there is zero state support, the only ones who might eventually help you are your kids? So procreating is a legitimate survival strategy.


I recognize that and am starting to wonder if that's actually humane.


Is it, or is it strong evidence that we have an innate fear of death built in?


Do they consciously decide this, or is this basic bio-chemistry, selected for over millennia? One would expect evolution to select for chemistry that make an organism want to continue living on. As those organisms have a higher chance of procreating and caring for their offsprings.


Or, most of the folks who preferred dying over having kids did so before procreating - and the folks left don’t have that issue.

Regardless of suffering levels.


"Support me on this I'll support you on that" is typical and routine in the halls of legislators, although much quieter. If we look at this as DeSantis telling Disney "support me on this legislation and I'll support more of your self-governing district" it doesn't sound nearly as bad. It kinda happens all the time, everywhere laws and sausages are made.


That isn't what DeSantis said at all. Disney had already spoken, DeSantis said "because you said that, kiss your special district goodbye". This was no backroom deal.


Just want to say that here in the US, if your employer ever doesn't pay you what you think you're owed, contact the Department of Labor. There's a division dedicated to making sure the employer doesn't play games with wages. They'll show up real fast, possibly even that day, and your employer will pay (plus fines).


I've been in this situation and I second this strategy. I removed ten+ years from my resume's experience section, removed graduation dates, and immediately saw an uptick in calls.

It isn't necessarily bias against age; it's bias against "overwhelming experience" that scares hiring off, for various reasons. But the result is the same.


Just to add my insignificant voice, I too was put off by the use of the word. I'm not familiar with the expression "pimp my ride" despite being American from birth. But I do know what a pimp is and it is a negatively, sexually charged word. I'm not asking you to change it, but I think it is to your benefit that you are aware that some subset of commenters here find it uncomfortable.


When the newspaper prints what time is sunrise, I don't write it to protest that the sun doesn't go anywhere; it's the Earth that is spinning on its axis. Sunrise is just the way we refer to that phenomenon because it looks like the sun is rising.

I think it's perfectly fine to say that your body was designed to do this or that. It may have been the result of random mutations, but evolution has done such a good job it damn well looks like it was designed.


> If you have production outages resulting from new code you have serious gaps in your certification process

If you have production outages every week, yeah. But no organization is free of production outages. When they do happen (I said when, not if) it matters a lot if you used standard libraries, code that is plugged into the infrastructure, and the like, and not hand-rolled cowboy code


> it matters a lot if you used standard libraries

Why? From a security perspective, an outage is a security matter, the remediation plan is what’s important.


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