- > In an open letter, they asked Carney to stick to Canadian English, writing that it is "a matter of our national history, identity and pride".
A bit touchy, aren't we?
There are much better things to be proud about than using "z" instead of "s" in a few words.
- The author also criticizes the narrowness of the font (and particularly of the bold style). They're not trying to argue that Times New Roman is terrible - just that it's substandard.
- Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?
- Here's what is says about Times New Roman:
> Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman. It was designed for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts—especially the bold style. (Newspapers prefer narrow fonts because they fit more text per line.) The italic is mediocre. But those aren’t fatal flaws. Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason.
It says that there are problems. They're just not fatal.
> It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
It says that there are plenty of alternatives (it specifically mentions Helvetica) that are better than Times New Roman. The argument is that Times New Roman is okay, but that it has flaws, and that there are easily available fonts that are superior. If someone is devoted enough to fonts to write a blog about them, then the existence of superior alternatives is enough of a reason to not use a font.
- Thanks for the interesting article.
Even though most of the casualties were caused by musket and artillery fire, the bayonet was tactically very important in Napoleonic warfare. A bayonet charge is absolutely terrifying, and the reason why there were relatively few casualties from them is likely because soldiers would break rank and flee in the face of one. If soldiers had stood their ground and fought, casualties would have been much higher, and with their low rate of fire, muskets would have been of little use in hand-to-hand combat.
They key change that happened in the mid-1800s is that firearms finally achieved ranges and rates of fire that made closing with a massed enemy nearly impossible.
- Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.
Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.
By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).
- It's not ideology. The US has started sanctioning European judges who serve on international courts, causing Microsoft to cut off access to its services.
Given that the US has shown it's willing to wield sanctions as a blunt instrument against anyone and everyone, it's only prudent for European countries to reduce their exposure to US tech.
- > You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic.
Again, you can't transmit if you're not infected.
> Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high
The "natural outcome" in this case is mass death. We know how respiratory diseases spread. You're arguing that we should have assumed Covid is a magical disease that refuses to spread in the perfect breeding ground - schools - until we did months of studies. That's an incredibly irresponsible attitude to take in the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions of people in the US alone.
> We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).
Science also works with plausibility and theory. In the middle of a pandemic, you have to base many of your decisions on what you know about other, similar diseases, what is scientifically plausible, etc. If we followed your recommendation, we would throw our hands up, do nothing, and let millions of people die, even though we would have a very good idea of what measures would likely prevent that.
> When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).
You're letting all the people who deliberately pushed paranoia for their own political gain off the hook, and blaming the people who did the most to fight the pandemic - the scientific and medical community.
- If true, how did that have any effect on Nortel? As I said before, Huawei wasn't a serious competitor for Nortel at that point. Nortel's business fell apart (and it started fudging its financials) long before Huawei expanded globally.
- > The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.
Actually, this is an area where I would criticize the CDC, though I understand why they did what they did. The first thing is that the US was desperately short on N95 masks, and not even medical staff who were treating Covid patients had reliable access to masks. Public health authorities were afraid of a run on masks (which happened anyways), which would make that situation even worse. The government should have explained the situation to people, appealed to their civic duty (which probably wouldn't work in the US), and taken emergency measures like commandeering stocks of N95 masks from retailers.
The other aspect of this, which one could see as "bad science," was that various studies had found that laypeople don't know how to wear masks properly, so their real-world effectiveness was in doubt. I think the correct response to that is to teach people how to wear them, not to say they don't work. But before the pandemic, there was genuinely dispute in the literature about what the best mask recommendation in a flu pandemic (which was what everyone was planning for) would be.
> Initial studies did not test for transmission.
Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.
> Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”.
It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.
> I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.
As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.
- Are you by chance an OpenAI investor?
We should all be happy about the price of AI coming down.
- The science on masks and vaccines was not "bad."
Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.
The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.
> And the insane vaccine mandate for children (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science.
It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic. The mRNA vaccines have a very good safety profile - the risk of side-effects is tiny. The most serious side-effect of the mRNA vaccines, myocarditis, is actually caused at a higher rate (and with greater severity) by Covid itself.
The scientific community did some amazing work during the pandemic. They almost instantly developed a vaccine that is extremely effective at preventing you from dying of Covid and which has a vanishingly small rate of serious side-effects. That would have been seen as a miracle a few decades ago.
What ruined the response to the pandemic was the politics of it, not the science. One aspect of that was the insane politicization of unalloyed goods like vaccination and masking. The paradox and tragedy of the United States is that despite having the finest scientific community in the world, most of the population is scientifically illiterate and open to manipulation and fear-mongering.
- At least in the world of chess (which has the OG matchmaking system, ELO), cheating is genuinely a problem.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.
- Not because of "bad science."
- Covid policy was bad mostly because it was driven by economic interests, not because of "bad science."
The only major scientific lapses I can think of in the US were the initial insistence that masks don't work and that the virus isn't airborne. The mask issue was influenced by the fact that they wanted to conserve masks for healthcare workers. I strongly suspect the airborne issue was heavily influenced by no one wanting to deal with the consequences: that stronger measures would be needed to reduce the spread of the virus.
- Enough to scare the rest into silence.
- Nortel collapsed long before Huawei even started competing outside of China in any serious way.
Nortel was severely hit by the bursting of the tech bubble, and then it got caught faking its financial figures. To blame that on Huawei is just a rewrite of history.
- When you check into a hotel in Europe, they ask for your passport. Why do you think that is?
- You've got the "elite capture" story the wrong way around. Most of the Chinese elite send their children to study in Europe and the US.
It was actually the US that was pressuring Europe to get rid of Chinese telecom equipment, as part of the first Trump administration's broader strategy against China.