Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Apparently CVS Minute Clinics will do it, but not in CT or some other states. We may just go get it done in Massachusetts to minimize the fuss, as annoying as that is.

Would be nice to know why Minute Clinics have this rule in CT, so that I can (I assume) call the relevant legislator.

@rodolpho No, that's a good idea! (I didn't even know these things existed.)

I'm going to call my insurance and see if they offer any options, if they can't help, I'll try the travel clinic.

I can't seem to find any way to get a flu shot for my 2 year old without going to a pediatrician (we don't have a pediatrician in the area yet, since we recently moved). Pediatricians won't give the shot unless you are a patient, CVS won't do it, urgent care doesn't do vaccines.

This seems less than advisable for a public health measure. I'd think that for something like preventing a kid from being a vector for a deadly disease, you'd want as little bureaucracy as possible. 😕

@2ck Also, I think that politics is a team sport for the majority of people in the US. If you are a straight-ticket Republican / Democrat voter (which most people are), you are not going to accidentally miss something in the news that would flip your vote to the other side of the aisle — anything that makes a particular candidate so disdainful that committed partisans would flip allegiance for them would be such a big story that you'd hear about it anyway.

On the other hand, spending your time studying a diverse selection of "long view" sources is almost certainly more likely to change your mind about what part(ies) to support or not support, since it could cause an evolution in your thinking about what the best policies are.

@2ck I disagree here. The marginal voter is probably not informed particularly well by following the news.

Consider this: your vote is most likely to make an impact (and have a direct impact on you) in local elections, but very few people follow local politics.

Also, voting happens fairly infrequently — you don't need to poll for that information at a high frequency. Your time is much better spent reading history, economics and political science to build a framework for what good policies look like, and then reading a dispassionate summary of the candidates' positions and their previous actions just prior to voting.

@Electronics Probably should have tagged this #electronics as well.

@Electronics Anyone have a suggestion on how to convert an LTSpice model to something that ngspice / oregano can handle?

I found a .asm / .asc schematic for the ULN2003 transistor array that I'd like to try out, but oregano doesn't seem to have a way to import it.

I'm willing to try other circuit simulators as long as they have a reasonable GUI. I already tried Qucs and it seems to be worse in this regard (and buggy in general).

I would really love it if there were a cultural norm that science journalism aimed at the general public would not publish stories about anything until it's accepted widely enough to be included in textbooks.

Instead, no one reads textbooks but they read the science section of the newspaper, which spouts out nonsense (and contradictory nonsense) that never gets any further scrutiny or coverage, and the public gets a horrible misunderstanding about both the nature of science and the nature of the universe. ☹

One thing I'll note about this: it's easy to think that I'm just talking about political news, but this 100% applies to "science journalism" as well. The scientific news cycle is so horribly broken (which I see as a major contributor to stuff like the reproducibility crisis), and I think a big part of the reason is that people have taken to following science happening "up to the minute", and as a result the only things that get covered as news are early-phase research papers — and ones that give surprising results!

Both of these things make it much more likely that any conclusions drawn from them would be spurious!

@brainwane And as I mentioned in one of the posts in the thread, I'm mainly talking about the current state of things, on the margin. I'm not advocating a situation where no news is produced and no one learns about the wider world, just that there's an immense over-production and over-consumption of news at the moment.

Interestingly, I could see a world where my view is "no one should read 'the news'" rather than "fewer people should read 'the news''" — one where there is no generalized news, and people tend to follow specialized news (e.g. I follow Python news and I could follow news about my neighborhood or my town). If we did this and cultivated networks of people we trusted to show us interesting things that are timely and actionable, we'd probably get a much better experience (chances are you are 1-2 degrees of freedom away from someone who could tell you about a deadly disease coming or something).

@brainwane At the end of the day, most world events are not something you can personally affect or which should change your behavior in any way.

In the very rare situations where this is the case, you'd be better off cultivating networks of people you trust to deliver you actual actionable information, since that automatically filters the signal from the noise for you.

@brainwane I appreciate your perspective on this.

I think that the position that people who have less table living situations need the news more is not incompatible with my thesis that fewer people should read the news — I would guess that the median news consumer is well-off and in a stable situation.

That said, I think that the vast majority of news is *not* actionable, and even for people who would take action it doesn't make sense to drink from the news firehose.

@drewfer It's certainly better than instant news, but it's still got all the wrong incentives, and is generally not terribly accurate.

@hansw Lol. I am by no means a "company man".

If you are not interested in a civil conversation please do not engage me, though.

@hansw The promise of targeted advertising is excellent: An oracle knows every product that is available and perfectly predicts your current and future desires, then tells you about things it knows you want.

Everyone is happy. Consumers get only information about what they want, producers know the exact size of their market and capture it fully (and can adjust what they produce if it is not profitable to produce for the market).

In practice, such an oracle doesn't exist and there are all kinds of unfortunate dynamics in the advertising market that makes it so that people generally don't like ads, plus all kinds of "off-target" effects.

@hansw If most of our information channels weren't dominated by some very unhealthy incentive structures, you would expect to be happy with advertising.

Many people *are* happy with certain forms of advertising — I have bought many things from "deal" websites, and I know many people who regularly read catalogues.

@hansw There is a coordination problem between producers and consumers. Consumers have a problem to be solved and producers are attempting to profit by solving it. In principle, this is usually beneficial to *both parties* — I would be made better off by most of my purchases even at much higher prices (and the sellers are making money on everything I buy).

In principle, advertising is a mechanism for telling people that there are solutions to their problems (or that the existing solutions have improved, or prices have changed, etc).

This is one reason I am a fan of targeted advertising in principle — it *should* prevent people from polluting the information landscape.

In practice, I'm not convinced it works amazingly well, and the pursuit of it has done all kinds of damage to the information consumption and distribution architecture ­— plus it's involved creating incredibly juicy targets for adversarial actors like governments.

Another thing to note: news is probably more useless than it should be because of the spam problem.

General news is probably fairly useless because there are just not a lot of things happening that everyone in the world needs to know about, so the S/N ratio is very low for any given consumer.

It's made even worse, though, because attention is valuable and any broad communications medium will be infested by memetic parasites.

Ideally, everyone in the world would be notified of stuff like, "Here's a new vaccine that will stop a terrible disease if you get it today", but any sufficiently broad, high-priority channel like that will get hijacked by people who think educating people about their preferred cause justifies using the scarce bandwidth of the high-priority broadcast spectrum.