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Comment Re:Weasel words (Score 1) 33

You are now doing a weird thing where you are focusing on the word "imply" rather than "show" as if that is some major difference in meaning. The use of "imply" here is simply due to the inherent limitations of any benchmarks. But please note that this is now your third claim you are making. Your first claim was that they "not disclosing what kind of a test, what criteria were benchmarked." That was shown to be wrong. Then you claimed in your second comment that "When in reality, they didn't actually tell you anything about the benchmarks. They merely told you what they called them." That was shown to be wrong, since the benchmarks in questions are not their own and are widely accessible. Now, in response, you've pivoted yet again, to make some massive deal out of the word "imply."

Comment Re:Weasel words (Score 1) 33

So 1) That's not what you said. 2) In fact, even if you had said that, it would still be wrong. The vast majority of of these benchmarks are benchmarks made by independent organizations where you can find the details of how they work without too much effort. For example, GSM-8k is available here. https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/gsm8k.

Comment Re:Market failure (Score 2) 133

No, it really is corporate interests. And it isn't a market failure as much as it is companies lobbying state governments to do things which wreck the free markets. For example, some US states have laws which make it difficult to build transmission lines into that state if one doesn't have generation in that state. That has made it very difficult to make new transmission lines for wind power from the Midwest to states in the Southeast. See for example this Wall Street Journal piece from a few years ago https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-the-wind-turbines-was-easy-the-hard-part-was-plugging-them-in-11561176010. The bottom line is that a lot of this is not market failure at all, but corporations deliberately using government to restrict competition from entering the markets. There are of course other issues, like how the US gives NIMBYs massive power to block things. But these are largely also things where the problem is not market failure except in so far as the governments, federal, state and local are stepping in already to distort the markets.

Comment And denial contributed also to low counts (Score 5, Insightful) 311

From summary:

One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.

There were also people who just refused to acknowledge loved ones had died of covid, and actively tried to block death certificates from listing covid. This is discussed in for example this article . In many cases, the official records simply used whatever family members said was the cause. Some were even more extreme. From that article:

In Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, coroner Wavis Jordan said his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” Jordan does not investigate deaths himself. He requires families to provide proof of a positive coronavirus test before including it on a death certificate. In 2021, he hasn’t pronounced a single person dead from COVID-19 in the 80,000-person county.

While part of this is due to lack of resources, and both TFA and the above linked piece discuss some of that, part of this is political in nature, with one end of the US right-wing deciding that covid wasn't a major issue and thus downplaying covid deaths. Unfortunately, downplaying a disease for political reasons doesn't make it less deadly.

Comment Re:Just let the kids have a day off (Score 1) 60

Letting kids have a day off is not a bad idea. But another major part of this is just how hard it is to pivot. I'm a school teacher. Pivoting to a remote lesson with 24 hours notice is a massive amount of work. Give a teacher a three or four days to prep for a remote day and we'll slide it in naturally. Tell someone less than 24 hours before that the next day is going to be remote, and it is unlikely to go well.

Comment Re:Obviously (Score 1) 128

It is true that we're unlikely to not stay below 2 C. But at the same time that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to reduce CO2. Every little bit of CO2 we produce makes the long term situation worse. We cannot look at some number and say that because we are going past that number that we should give up.

Comment Re:meh perfect (Score 1) 30

I mean there's plenty of museum exhibits in LA that feature our contributions to unmanned space flight as well. For instance at this very same museum there is a full sized engineering mockup of the Cassini probe. I think the Griffith Observatory used to have a full sized mockup of Voyager as well but I don't think its there any more. In any case manned space flight has always captured the public's imagination a lot more than unmanned flight has, with maybe a few exceptions like Hubble and Webb telescopes.

Also "Ironic that L.A. wonks...." do you also include in that the Florida wonks, and the D.C. wonks, and the New York wonks, and the Houston wonks who all have or wanted an orbiter of their own and or have other manned rockets like the huge Saturn V exhibit at Kennedy?

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