Nitramp

I don't think that's absurd? Both can be true at the same time, a government can stop discriminating you for one thing, while starting to repress you for another. Whether that's a net negative for any individual depends on circumstance and detail.

It's obvious if you reduce it to the absurd: e.g. if a government decides the abolish slavery (terrible discrimination for a specific group) while also disallowing chewing gum for everyone. Similarly you can construct examples for the inverse (a minor reduction of discrimination vs a great loss of freedom for everyone).

History is pretty clear in its opinion on the (lack of) merits of Stalinism, but I don't think you can construct a general principle in the phrasing you chose.

I think you have that backwards.

Ballweg is in jail because allegedly he took in donations to support a cause, but then (ab)used them for himself personally, defrauding the donors and evading taxation. That's illegal, and thus he's in jail.

Indeed protesting Covid is not enough to put you in jail, because that's not actually illegal. You're insinuating the government chose to persecute him for his political views. That's a pretty bold claim that I think would need substantiation.

Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

It struck me as really bizarre.

Multiple people died over the course of the efficacy study for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, and yet they completed the study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

In general, what you claim would seem both surprising and impractical to me. There are many studies on very seriously ill groups, where the death of a large portion of participants is expected.

I concur, SQL is a liability in many ways.

Google: "North Korea Ransomware"

It's a lot easier to implement reliably due to the requirement for everyone to have ID cards though (and the ID cards carry your residence address).

Constitutions do not just limit power. They prescribe how a society organizes itself, including how to exert power (not just how to limit it). A major goal for democratic constitutions is enabling a society to make collective decisions.

E.g. the US congress is famously struggling to make decisions. An interesting question then is how the US constitution prescribes decisions must be made, and whether that framework of decision making is successful along certain criteria (e.g. representing voter will, protecting fundamental rights).

If you're interested in comparing to other constitutions, a good way might be researching countries that "score well", e.g. that have stable governments, non-violent transitions of power, successful decision making, score well on the human development index, etc. - or countries where things are going particularly poor. I find that the positive example is often more interesting, because the poor outcomes often have major negative factors that might not apply in other countries and might not relate to their respective constitution.

Countries that come to mind would be the likes of Sweden, Japan, Botswana, New Zealand, but your mileage may vary depending on what you consider to be positive outcomes for a society.

Do you have specific reasons why you think that's the case? I did give concrete examples, some of which are indeed recent events, but all of these seem to hold in general outside the context of recent events.

> Still, the US constitution is pretty great. I don't know of one that is better.

What countries do you compare to here? And what would be the dimensions you're comparing them on?

> I don't believe the current political climate could improve it significantly.

I think that's true, but that might speak more to the political climate in the US than the inherent quality of the constitution.

That's a very surprising take to me.

Some more obvious problems with the US constitution are highly ambiguous clauses (right to bear arms vs militias), unclear powers assigned to parts of the government (could Pence have legally decided on the electors to make Trump win? what's the exact succession of powers?), an election system causing imbalanced voting power (how many senators per state vs population, first-past-the-post vote), important rights left undefined (right to privacy vs the abortion issue), and many many more issues. These really are just the recent things that come to mind. These problems also don't seem scholarly, they appear to have substantial impact on political reality.

The US constitution was certainly a huge achievement for the 18th century. There's - unsurprisingly - been a lot of progress in constitutional theory in the 235 years after though, and it seems like it is a massive liability for the US by now.

I think it boils down to the prevalence of using simple magnetic stripe credit card payments. While chip-and-PIN or Google/Apple pay are of course also subject to fraud, not having even a first factor (pin/password/fingerprint) makes card copying and theft viable in the first place.

I have no data, but I'd bet that you get substantially less fraud if you only process transactions with a first security factor, and you can probably still improve on that with a second factor (e.g. text message to authorize).

As a consumer, I have to deal with declined transaction frequently (I moved which creates a mess for ZIP based "auth", another cause is using cards outside my home country); I find the whole situation hugely frustrating.

The very point of Orwell was recognizing this, and the fundamental similarity across totalitarian ideologies.

There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc).

There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050.

So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.

Think about where we would be if we hadn't gone down this path. We can all help move things forward if we meet each other with an open mind, and steer clear of the resentment and national chauvinism of the past.

There's B2B work typically characterized by a low number of very high value transactions, so you run a few servers, and your math works out.

And then there are consumer services such as Instagram or Google maps or TikTok that see a huge amount of very low value requests that only contribute a small trifling in ad revenue. When your service needs to process millions of requests to pay for your service, your math no longer works out.

One of the beauties of modern computing is that our economies of scale enable us to deliver complex services such as Instagram etc at cost, for free. That's pretty amazing if you think of it, but engineers need to be very stingy for this to work out.

The theory is that we're not chewing hard enough food, which leads to insufficient jawbone growth as a kid, leading to not enough space for your teeth.

The most solid data source they found in Germany was a local club of enthusiast entomologists who had been collecting bugs using the same traps, locations, and methodology over the past 80+ years.

The answer btw was yes, there was a marked reduction over that time frame.

Is that not an option in the US?

I remember making sending emails cost a tiny fraction of a dollar was proposed some time back in the nineties to stop email spam. That was superseded by effective bayesian spam filters. The cost of that is that it's near impossible to self host email servers these days, as all those filters will label you as a spammer. Otoh requiring some payment solution would also be a strong barrier...

E.g. in SF, you'll pay $3500+ for housing, and salaries are largely adjusted for that level of expense. But your savings are "future money", and you can choose where to spend that. Saving $300 a month, $4k a year, can add up to sums that are significant in a lower cost of living area.

It took surprisingly long to track down, partially due to this all being dependent on various ambient Information (env vars, browser config, arguments passed, what exact function is called, etc).

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11723

Weltlichkeit (says Heidegger).

I don't think you can set something loose in traffic that relies on everyone else correcting for its mistakes.

This obviously doesn't quite translate, but the amount of damage you can do with a car is massive, even at that speed. Also consider the weight, eg when rolling over a pedestrian.