ANewFormation

In spite of claims to the contrary there is luck in chess. Your form (and your opponents') varies significantly over time, the outcome of competitive opening prep, or even just how well you're sleeping.

The stars really aligned for Gukesh in countless ways, his form and openings hit when and where they needed to, and he was left playing a very out-of-form world champ who wasn't even in the top 20 in the world.

I suspect his record (world champ at 18) will remain intact for many decades yet to come. He attributed much of his success to God, and even as an agnostic - I'm inclined to agree!

Notably he's still nowhere near the strongest player in the world - he's not even the strongest Indian! The world championship in chess can be an odd beast at times.

It's 100% possible to become a master starting as an adult, but it requires a certain sort of person - you're looking at thousands upon thousands of hours of difficult work paired alongside endless frustrations, obstacles, seriously low emotional lows the game can cause (think about how Ding feels right now, even if it wasn't a game for the title), and more.

The idea of becoming a master, especially as an adult, is far more appealing than the reality of it for most people.

This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game.

Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game.

In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened.

Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.

They shot down at least 3 including one that 100% belonged to a local club, meaning the military had no clue what they were launching missiles at. One was shot down over Lake Huron, and the pilot actually even managed to miss the balloon with his missile. It's like 99 Red Balloons meets Idiocracy.

Obviously the military can shoot down whatever they want, let alone use EM tech, which is highly effective at grounding drones. Drones keep getting sighted near the exact areas that would be testing out drone militarization, and not getting shot down. Gee, I wonder who's they might be.

People would be so dramatically more informed if they dropped social media and corporate news.

I do wonder how many will get the reference.

Yeah they can only shoot down unidentified weather balloons.

Why is this a bad thing? Its possible I'm missing some nuance because I have not dealt with the US education system in a long time, but I think one fundamental problem with universal education is that one really bad student can easily ruin the education of dozens of others.

If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.

This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.

If you go by literally any venue where people talk. There is, at the minimum, widespread 'darn - a completely awful human was killed - what a shame' mentality everywhere, and across the political spectrum.

Justice is not defined by the law, but by personal values. The prosecutor in this case is going to be obsessive in ensuring that none of the jurors understand their legal right to jury nullification, because if they do - this guy stands a very high chance of a mistrial - if not outright acquittal.

It's not just America. Shinzo Abe was assassinated, with security and at a public event, by somebody using a homemade gun with homemade ammo.

As tech advances over time, this will all only become even more true.

Insurance companies have a motivation to see high healthcare costs - it justifies higher premiums, and in a broken 'public' healthcare system that entrenches insurance middlemen, and subsidizes their costs for those unable to afford them, you're just going to see costs skyrocket endlessly.

Public healthcare, of any sort, should not involve working with third party insurance companies.

In any case, this is also why medical tourism is a thing - you could go get the exact same treatment, to completion, half way around for far less than what you the cost you were quoted for a single round in the US - including housing and other costs.

They also had Novosti = the news. It led to a fun joke: "Why do we have two newspapers, Truth and News? Well that's because there's no truth in News, and no news in Truth."

Alot of these old Soviet jokes are becoming quite appropriate again. What times we live in.

An adjacent point is that states are free to run their elections as they see fit with relatively few rules. For example most states have a winner-take-all result for presidential elections where a guy who gets 51% of the vote get 100% of the 'seats', so to speak. But that's not necessary - Maine and Nebraska, by contrast, have proportional systems, where they split their vote proportionally.

So how to interpret the results from one state could be quite different (and potentially subject to rapid change) even if you know the results were genuine. So the results of states always would need to be converted, by the states, into e.g. 15 final votes. So the electoral college emerges quite naturally in this context.

The entire world is based on cooperation even with nations one may not like. China, for instance, is the manufacturing backbone of the world - to say nothing of being the primary source of many critical elements, such as those used in electric batteries, solar, and so on.

And war between the US and China will also happen as soon as China moves to reintegrate Taiwan, and the EU will again be expected to work as a tool of the US, to its own detriment.

Will you then say that the EU should have done away with cheap Chinese manufacturing and resources earlier? And claim it was some sort of a Trojan Horse? Or will at some point the EU consider putting EU interests first?

At least one body known as "Green Boots" [1] is used as a common milestone. His identity is unknown for certain.

The reason one does such things, though, is because they're difficult, so I'd imagine the bodies are motivating - focus or you'll be the next milestone.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Boots

As a peer alluded to, that's going to be for some ideal demographic in their twenties (probably early), hitting ovulation perfectly. Age changes things dramatically:

"Women younger than 30 have about a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant naturally each month. By age 40, the chance of pregnancy is about five percent each month." [1]

Things like IVF do not dramatically change the odds either. They're better of course, but it's far from guaranteed - it's still just a rather expensive roll of the dice.

Then on top of all of this, having children later greatly increases the chances of miscarriage, developmental issues (like Down syndrome) and so on.

Life's brutal here - you're in a race against time, yet the later you start the longer it takes, and the harder it becomes.

[1] - https://www.yourfertility.org.au/everyone/age

It's not about location, but socioeconomic class. Most people live in bubbles. How many people do you know who earn less than $51k per year? Because it turns out that's the majority of Americans. [1]

Similarly, how many households do you know with combined income of less than $62k? Because that is also the majority.

You're not going to find these people in BMWs or big houses, well not without life destroying debt at least. People being completely aloof of these data (or headlines like this one) are how you get November 5th.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States

They aren't in 'traditional' households where at least one parent stays at home. Without that daycare/nanny and other costs can become very significant. It's also not just daytime stuff. Babies need to feed every 2-3 hours, including at night, and each feeding session can be quite lengthy. That doesn't synergize so well with getting a full night's rest to go join the rat race the next day.

A sustainable population - not increasing just staying the same - requires each and every single female have more than 2 children on average.

Starting in your 30s, especially later 30s makes this extremely difficult. It takes months of perfectly hitting ovulation windows to get pregnant, and then you generally want at least ~9 months between children, so you're looking at ~2 years per child, all while fertility starts to rapidly decline as you head into your 40s.

The long and short is that a sustainable population is going to require the majority to start having children in their 20s. That figure going down has nothing to do with teen pregnancy.

What I'm getting at is that baseline costs for a cubic foot are about $1.50. A startup could sell cubic foot containers for $5 - shipped when able to fill a crate, and have a massive margin, for those willing to trade time for a 95% cost reduction. That no such service exists is so weird and dysfunctional.

This also applies to endless other real world things and services. Prices for so many things are completely out of touch with reasonably approachable costs, yet there's no Elon in shipping or these zillion other broken industries that, if fixed, could really reshape and perhaps even revitalize the American economy.

In the past elections were, at least on occassion, won by massive landslides, before then the 'other side' ending up back in power.

This is only possible if people, at scale, were voting based on merit, rather than tribalism.

Nowadays either side could run a literal vegetable and get near half the vote.

I don't think the shipping is about infrastructure, but I don't know what it is. You can get a 40 foot shipping container (~2400 cubic feet) shipped half way around the world for ~$4k, yet try to ship a cubic foot of volume using any normal commercial shipping service, and you'll probably pay $100+.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but if not then the shipping market is just completely broken and begging for disruption.

The line I like to use here when people talk about this sort of 'transferring' your consciousness - imagine there was a 'perfect' chatbot trained on your every experience, thought, and sensation, and mind.

OK, now your consciousness is 'transferred'. I promise to run you.exe plenty. It's just an exercise in self delusion, even if this was possible. That's not you anymore than a 'you' created by a taxidermist and shoved in a closet is.

You should check out South Korea's history. Presidents ending up in prison or killed is a national tradition.

If there were a prediction market for this within 3 years, I'd expect the line to be around 70%. He just did a weird spin on the 'if you go after the king, don't miss' and missed.

In the oath officer's swear, it is exclusively to the Constitution - with no mention of anything but - swearing to protect against enemies foreign and domestic.

Interestingly the oath for enlisted does include a section on obeying the President, subject to the military Code.

So protestors, and other politicians, rejected his claim of martial law - it's now over, and he will likely be arrested.

Seems there yet remains more to power than titles and declarations.

Assad had majority approval prior to the war [1] (can't find any more recent adversarial polls, which may be telling) and his family has been in power for decades. The comparison is inappropriate.

It's more akin to saying that states adversarial to the US won after the CIA overthrew a popular secular democracy in Iran, and installed a extremely unpopular puppet monarchy that was obseqious to the US.

In general maintaining power without relatively widespread support is quite difficult - probably even more so in the digital era which makes conspiracies so much easier to organise.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrian...

I doubt this has anything to do with anybody outside of South Korea, but this is precisely the sort of man adversarial states would want.

Think about what's going to happen next! You have an extremely unpopular leader trying to sieze power by force, presumably soon banning opposition parties and more.

It's going to create extreme discontent at the minimum, and civil war at a maximum. And once he's eventually overthrown, his allies and interests often become anathema to the next regime, and the people.

This is is like an enemy successfully carrying out a color revolution on fast forward.

The interesting thing about this is that rockets can easily be net negative in terms of CO2 stuff.

One way is in the fuel itself. For instance the Space Shuttle main engine was powered by combustion generated from liquid hydrogen + liquid oxygen - the exhaust was literally water vapor.

A second interesting nuance is that any fuel burnt outside of Earth's atmosphere is a carbon reduction, so a hypothetical rocket that could get out of the atmosphere on 50% of its fuel would be net neutral/negative.

Imagine when we get the first interstellar ships. Even if 90% of them blow up at launch, it'd still be, by far, the 'safest' method of transit in existence if we use the deaths/mile stat.

Even for planes the stat is deceptive. Most people, hearing about the safety of flight, would think that if they replaced their car with a plane then they'd be far less likely to die in a crash, but that would be untrue because the real risk in flight is take off and landing - the distance traveled is near irrelevant.

Steam/GoG and other services disprove this quite clearly. You can pirate games sold on these platforms trivially and safely. In the case of GoG you can often even get signed installers given the trend against drm.

Nonetheless these services are highly successful and profitable. I think one problem is this weirdness of the 21st century where many companies, especially in media, are seen as antagonistic towards their own customers - this provides a major motivation for piracy.

For games, particularly from smaller studios, it's the exact opposite. They generally seem highly concerned with the interest and satisfaction of their players, and so you want to pay them. Many of these studios even sell things like soundtracks (already available in the install folder) as 'pay more' buttons, and plenty of people buy them.