In addition, we’re facing the threat of massive unemployment due to some kind of digital technology. One of these areas of unemployment of course is driverless vehicles. There are also the self-checkout machines in some supermarkets and drugstores. When I go in and out of those stores, I shout to the people by those machines, If you use these machines, you’re putting other people out of work. When I recognized that, I decided I wouldn’t use them. I’d always go to the human sales agent and help them stay employed. I think we could allow driverless vehicles and self-checkout once we have a system like a universal basic income.

And I’m not interested in discussing the privacy policies that these companies have. First of all, privacy policies are written so that they appear to promise you some sort of respect for privacy, while in fact having such loopholes that the company can do anything at all. But second, the privacy policy of the company doesn’t do anything to stop the FBI from taking all that data every week. Anytime anybody starts collecting some data, if the FBI thinks it’s interesting, it will grab that data.

A database about people can be misused in four ways. First, the organization that collects the data can misuse the data. Second, rogue employees can misuse the data. Third, unrelated parties can steal the data and misuse it. That happens frequently, too. And fourth, the state can collect the data and do really horrible things with it, like put people in prison camps. Which is what happened famously in World War II in the United States. And the data can also enable, as it did in World War II, Nazis to find Jews to kill.

Of late, Chinese military observers have been increasingly concerned about the potential of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network in helping the US military dominate space, especially so, in the wake of the Ukraine war, where Elon Musk activated Starlink satellites to restore communications that had stopped because of shelling by the Russian troops.

there may be an interaction with diabetes: a ⁠small correlational study found a long-term correlation between nicotine gum and hyperinsulinemia & insulin resistance (an experimental rat study ⁠found the opposite); and ⁠Axelsson et al 2001 found a short-term effect but only in diabetics, similar to ⁠Morgan et al 2004’s no acute effect in its (all-healthy) volunteers. (Unfortunately, most studies published since 1996 citing Eliasson et al 1996 in Google Scholar are focused on tobacco products or smoking.)

One difficulty with gum, however, is that it’s hard to subdivide: nicotine evaporates from gum and so cutting up a 4mg piece of gum into 4 1mg pieces forces you to either use them all within a few hours, waste some pieces, or store them in some sort of air-tight wrapper for later use.

My lozenges (when I had them) were 4mg… which I would consider almost too much. About equivalent to a full double-dose can of energy drink. If I use nicotine as a stimulant now I tend to go with about 4mg of 16 hour patch. (That is, I cut the 24mg 16 hour patches into small pieces).

doses past 14mg seem to harm performance

nicotine affects the cholinergic system - the same system piracetam affects.

“People are unreasonably afraid of nicotine”, Dr. Shiffman said. “The majority of smokers believe that nicotine causes cancer and is a big player in the harm caused by cigarettes.” In fact, carbon monoxide, tar and the countless toxic particles in cigarette smoke are what promote illness. Although smokers may become dependent on nicotine, it does not appear to raise the risk of cancer, lung disease or heart disease. Early reports that people who smoked cigarettes while wearing a patch stood an increased risk of heart attack proved unfounded years ago.

The 2019 United States outbreak of lung illness linked to vaping products offers a case in point of this prejudice: despite every sign pointing to adulterants added to illegal THC/​marijuana vaping fluids by fly-by-night operators rather than nicotine (such as the decades of nicotine vaping by millions of people not causing them to land overnight in hospital ICUs), the outbreak has been used as an excuse to ban legal nicotine vaping fluids instead—which is like banning aspirin as a response to the opiate crisis because they’re both used for pain relief and they both come in pill form, and some OD victims also used aspirin recently, so that makes them pretty much the same thing, right?

Paradoxically, the drive to neuter as many cats as possible, with its laudable aim of reducing the suffering of unwanted kittens, may be gradually eliminating the characteristics of the very cats best suited to living in harmony with humankind: many of the cats that avoid neutering are those that are most suspicious of people and the best at hunting. The friendliest, most docile cats are nowadays neutered before leaving any descendants, while the wildest, meanest ferals are likely to escape the attention of cat rescuers and breed at will, thus pushing the cat’s evolution away from, rather than toward, better integration with human society.

In other words, cats are barely domesticated.

A cat without any human contact before 10 weeks will be near-feral (except in the case of severe trauma, apparently, where it may bond with its rescuer, analogous perhaps with “hitting bottom”).

I also note that most people are bad at dealing with cats, making what should be clear errors (again, despite cats being the #1 or #2 most common pet in the world & so ignorance should not be a problem): I don’t know how many times I have seen someone try to touch a cat’s belly, start petting it with a full-body stroke rather than a chin or head scratch, insist on scratching them at the butt-tail point, interpret tail-lashing (the opposite of dogs, ‘tail wagging’ is a bad thing!), or ears pinned back as good things, try to pick them up, or startle them by abrupt untelegraphed movements. In contrast, while I have seen many people with poor dog manners (such as not presenting their hand to be sniffed or even people oblivious enough to attempt to pet a growling dog with teeth bared), people generally seem to make fewer mistakes, the dogs more clearly communicate with the humans, and the dogs tolerate the inevitable mistakes better (rather than running away or biting).

Another unexpected conclusion stemming from Shannon’s theory is that whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it. So in a radio system, for example, even though both the initial sound and the electromagnetic signal sent over the air are analog wave forms, Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave. This surprising result is a cornerstone of the modern digital information age, where the bit reigns supreme as the universal currency of information.

Second, he provided a formula for the maximum number of bits per second that can be reliably communicated in the face of noise, which he called the system’s capacity, C. This is the maximum rate at which the receiver can resolve the message’s uncertainty, effectively making it the speed limit for communication.

First, Shannon came up with a formula for the minimum number of bits per second to represent the information, a number he called its entropy rate, H. This number quantifies the uncertainty involved in determining which message the source will generate. The lower the entropy rate, the less the uncertainty, and thus the easier it is to compress the message into something shorter. For example, texting at the rate of 100 English letters per minute means sending one out of 26100 possible messages every minute, each represented by a sequence of 100 letters. One could encode all these possibilities into 470 bits, since 2470 ≈ 26100. If the sequences were equally likely, then Shannon’s formula would say that the entropy rate is indeed 470 bits per minute. In reality, some sequences are much more likely than others, and the entropy rate is much lower, allowing for greater compression.

I like the idea of giving people some help expressing themselves at work. You might be interested to learn about the Power Distance Index, and the body of work on PDI and work culture.You’ll see if you read the comments here that some people are like “the alternatives are bullshit corporate speak and infuriate me”, and some are like “yes, at last, a way to help people be more polite / better communicators”. There’s a smattering of “this is passive aggressive” thrown in.One of the broad pitches PDI at work types make is that the lower the PDI, the more direct communications are preferred; the higher, the more ‘diplomatic’ the communications are preferred. My vibe on your list is that it’s just a tad more diplomatic than Silicon Valley wants to be, hence the slight negative ‘passive aggressive’ reactions.Some of the lowest PDI countries in the world are Israel, and many Northern European countries, and it fits my experience that in those places additional respect is given for bluntness - as Jan Maas in Ted Lasso says “I’m not rude, I’m Dutch.” As a broad stereotype using the alternate wordings you give would be a sign you are not someone to be respected in that environment.On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s PDI is high, and I would bet that some of your alternate list there would still be much too rude; just a guess, I haven’t worked in Saudi.Anyway, thanks again for this; if you stay interested, you might consider reworking this into different ‘cultural norms’ lists to help people acclimate / go both ways; at that point, I think it would be a very broadly useful resource.