Brand-name Sharpie markers cost around US $1 to US $1.50 per marker.

Budget or generic alternatives cost as low as US $0.20 to US $0.50 per marker.

I've tried the cheap ones, have not been impressed.

Rehabilitate and/or deter. The extent to which it is either the former or the latter depends on the country. That also determines whether or not "treating them badly" should be a feature of the justice system.

1. Early-life exposure to diverse, nonpathogenic microbes is linked to lower risk of allergies and asthma: "farm effect" (Amish vs. Hutterite study showing microbe-rich house dust associates with protection). 2. What matters is exposure to the right environmental and commensal microbes, not skipping handwashing or basic hygiene. Microbial diversity is good; pathogen exposure is not.

I don't think you need to be a doctor to come to a conclusion that a system exposed to more learning data is more knowledgable.

This issue to me seems to be entirely a study of psychology not biology.

> I don't think you need to be a doctor to come to a conclusion that a system exposed to more learning data is more knowledgable.

Be careful! You still need to explain why early exposure to lots of bacteria is good, but exposure to lots of heavy metals is (presumably) bad.

Hormesis is also a thing.

Maybe. But whether it applies to heavy metals or not is an empirical question, not something we can decide from the comfort of our armchairs by coming to conclusions like "a system exposed to more learning data is more knowledgable.[sic]"

Diet is inherrently linked to autoimmune diseases and allergies, as well.

You won't get the important species colonizing your gut if you don't feed them the food they need.

Read the text and judge for yourself how the diacritical marks affect readability.

Uh yeah they don't? Unless you also have problems with words such as über, façade, señor or crème brûlée.

Rather, the removal of them affects readability in a similar way to removing accents, punctuation or writing in all lowercase.

There are two types of diacritics, from the perspective of any reader: the ones they are familiar with and understand, and the ones that are visual noise. American and (West) European audiences are typically more or less familiar with the umlaut, accent, cedille and circumflex mark, and the tilde. Other diacritical marks typically fall in the second category for them, outside of use in their own language.

So expose the reader to them until they become familiar, problem solved

so just ignore the "visual noise" or "random scribbles"? i dont get why youd want to remove meaning from an article simply because you dont undestand it.

For the same reason you choose one font over another: the aesthetics of a text matter, especially to publishers.

Now, I should add that for an article that is specifically about language, and even has some illustrations of the meaning of these diacritics, this is almost certainly a bad choice on the NYT's part. But as a general rule, I think it is defensible.

Well, I disagree that simpler means better looking. It's akin to arguing that a commie block has better æsthetics than a gothic cathedral.

China is not a centrally planned economy.

There are five year plans. The 14th Five Year Plan is just finishing up, and the 15th Five Year Plan is in final discussions, with formal approval in October. Comments from outside China indicate that about 80% of the goals of the 14th plan were achieved. High speed rail, energy, electric cars, mechanization of agriculture, and consumer goods worked out very well. There was overbuilding and a crash in housing and commercial construction. Areas of technical trouble are jetliners and high end semiconductors. That's about what was expected. The five year plans have been ambitious but realistic in recent decades. Up until the 1990s, they were totally unrealistic. Famines resulted.

These plans mostly drive capital allocation. It's not like the USSR's GOSPLAN, which actually set production quotas for factories. That worked badly, especially with a one-year update cycle.

Some economic planning is not central planning. Otherwise the US in the 30s and post-war France were both centrally-planned economies.

For a while, both were. Certainly once the US entered the war it was a centrally-planned economy.

I don’t think you actually disagree with the person you replied to. The point of saying China isn’t a centrally planned economy wasn’t to say there is no central planning at all, but that it’s invalid to conclude that the level of planning China does do condemns it to failure.

correct - it is a centrally directed economy, where the implementation is successively and 'pyramidically localised'