TangoTrotFox

Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually turned into 'any form of optimization short of making sure you don't run O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority.' But like anybody who's worked on a project knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than what sent us to the moon.

I think it all has to do with something very simple: opportunity + nationalism. Post WW2 US was basically a land of endless opportunity spurred on by great nationalism. The reason nationalism is important is because it helps align motivations beyond just profit. Now a days most large corporations wouldn't think twice about firing all their domestic workers if they could profitably replace them with cheaper workers in another country. This is ostensibly good for the corporation, but not so great for the country, and worst of all for the workers left behind. Aside from that social bond there is also a practical commercial one. When individuals in a nation strongly bias towards domestic products, this incentivizes domestic production. E.g. - 'Made in the USA' was a major selling point.

But most importantly, I think you'll find this pattern of opportunity + nationalism is something that maps pretty well to national success in general. The US in its boom times, China today, the rebuilding of South Korea, Japan, etc.. What triggers the eventual decline there though is something far more difficult to answer. E.g. the US and South Korea continue to grow, while Japan ended up facing (and continuing to face) decades of stagnation.

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Sufficiently flawed journalism is perhaps one of the most severe problems in our society. People are fed half truths, and at times simply false information, and then go on to repeat it and base their world views upon as if it were fact. And in the era of social media false and sensational views spread incredibly rapidly while any 'corrections' are basically dead on arrival.

To give a very recent example of this, you probably read about a shocking new study showing that the oceans are actually heating up 60% faster than we thought. Turns out the study was mathematically flawed and its actual numbers are not particularly different than what other studies have shown. [1][2][3]. And the error was detected just hours after publication - apparently not quickly enough to stop the shocking headlines. This is not an implied comment on climate change, but rather just a very recent example of this phenomena of how people are misled without having their views ultimately corrected that happens to involve climate change.

The sites that rely on 'teasing' and then paywalling are some of the worst offenders in the state of journalism today, and in my opinion the world, let alone society, would be in a much better place without them.

[1] - https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/sd-me-...

[2] - https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-oceans-...

[3] - https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/06/a-major-problem-with-the-...

In the age before Steam you had to approach a publisher to get your product out there. And in those days getting a 70% deal would have been amazing. Except back then 70% meant something rather different. The publisher was getting 70% and you received 30% in "royalties" (and generally substantially less than 30%). Oh and you received $0 in "royalties" until the publisher cleared 100% of their costs. And finally of course you had to relinquish nearly every right to your IP as well.

I wouldn't underestimate the value that Steam adds. They take care of all financial related issues including trust, facilitate 'advertising', provide a captive audience upwards of 125 million, take care of data hosting (which can be a very significant issue in large-size products), and more. I'm sure they could get by with a smaller margin, but at the same time I think 30% is a pretty reasonable rate for the value they add.

As for Marx, something doe eyed students of today often forget is that academia can and does often go extremely far astray, particularly on social issues where a dangerous hive mind frequently emerges. For instance in the early 20th century we in the US, and the academic establishment in particular, were the biggest drivers behind eugenics. We were literally the inspiration for Hitler who saw his own work as building off our 'progress.' His work ultimately being the one and only reason that eugenics in the US was scaled back and gradually became taboo.

The rise of Marxist ideology corresponded with an extremely sharp increase in the number of individuals pursuing the social sciences and liberal arts at the postgraduate level. Unfortunately these studies, in this quantity, do not really correspond to being able to contribute to society in any meaningful way. That's not to say the arts and humanities inherently do not contribute as they most certainly do. But society cannot support a billion philosophers anymore than it can support a billion neurosurgeons or plumbers. Thus enter Marxism which is little more than a fancification of striving to live as Marx did: drink and drug yourself to stupidity while writing whatever you want. Time to put food on the table? Just mooch off Engels and your brother-in-law.

You'll also find that going back in time there were also far fewer rules against individual entrepreneurship. And where there were rules they were enforced in a more sane fashion. E.g. - even if a kid's lemonade stand isn't obeying regulation 3753 section 3, or city ordinance 4725-4 or whatever, you don't go and shut down the stand as the stand is doing nothing but good for everybody.

But as we transition towards corporatism rules against large companies start to disappear or fail to be enforced, while those rules against small companies and individuals start to grow and become unreasonably burdensome as well as extremely actively enforced.

The one part we don't agree on is why corporations are allowed to merge. For instance it's quite evident that Time Warner alone has already exploited their monopoly to increase prices unreasonable. Internet service in America is far more expensive than in many parts of the world, yet the quality is not particularly remarkable. And there's no justifiable reason. It's just companies agreeing not to compete and then jacking up their prices. Because of this it's not reasonable to suggest they're being technically allowed to merge/acquire further competitors because there's no evidence that they won't do what they're already doing. This is just another aspect of corporatism where rules disappear as companies grow large enough.

And this is where I think corporatism excels. There are now just an immense number of rules and laws that are all increasingly esoteric even to operate quite simple businesses. And that's before you get into the countless fees and costs the government demands before you've even sold your first product. In other words when you kill off entrepreneurship and start moving away from capitalism, you invariably head towards corporatism which is itself headed much closer to feudalism than capitalism.

As for the king example, this was relating to the feudalism -> capitalism -> corporatism -> feudalism loop, not your specific suggestion. As for your suggestion, there are two big issues. The first is the same as discussed here. Capitalism and competition is a growth system. The reason e.g. Elon Musk was able to create a competitive rocket and vehicle company was because he earned hundreds of millions of dollars in another venture. No individual has any personal need for hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is strictly required if this individual wishes to engage in large scale ventures - the sort of which stand to massively improve society.

The second issue is probably the bigger point. We already have countless laws, on the order of thousands of pages, of laws relating to competition, anticompetitive behavior, restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, etc. These were all geared minimizing anti-competitive ownership. But the general rule in a corporatist society holds true. We have the FTC approve mergers between e.g. AT&T/Time Warner/Charter while rejecting mergers between far smaller companies that could eventually become the competitors for these sort of behemoths that increasingly stand above the law, and perhaps even above government.

In other words, write the laws and expect to see you and I only be able to own e.g. one tavern. But expect to see the king's friends somehow manage to own thousands. Corporatism in a nutshell.

I'm unsure what the latest numbers are but they offer the data to 2013. And just between 2008 and 2013 adult usage of ADHD medication doubled. It was at 2.8% and has likely continued to rapidly increase. That's completed dwarfed by what we're now doing to kids and particularly boys. In 2013 we were up to 9.8% of all boys 12-18 years taking ADHD drugs. And those numbers again were, and presumably still are, rapidly increasing.

I have this likely decreasingly controversial view that history is not going to look back so kindly on psychology and our decision to start pretending we can create a pill for everything. I mean what could possibly go wrong getting 10%+ of boys setup with stimulants, and increasingly often other sorts of psychotropics as well, from their earliest and most critical developmental years?

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Of course I'm sure people will now respond with how these drugs saved their life and without them they'd be homeless, in prison, etc. To these people I have a simple logical question. Let's assume this is true that you would indeed be homeless, in prison, etc without these drugs. We now see these drugs numbers are absolutely skyrocketing to the point that sizable chunks of our entire population are on them. So if we go back in time, why don't we see skyrocketing prison/homelessness/etc as a consequence of people not being able to have these drugs? Given the exponential increase in prescribing rates you don't need to go back far. We should be able to see huge and causably linked differences just over the last decade or two.

[1] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dear-mona-how-many-adul...

And that is really the issue. The further you limit the ability of people to engage the market (as buyer and seller) the further away you move from capitalism. And that is precisely what our current system is doing. Repeating the same example just because it's so stupefying. In most places in America today you cannot legally setup a lemonade stand and start selling lemonade on your own property. We're creating a culture of passive consumers driven by extreme regulations against everything except such!

The most underlying and critical point of capitalism is an individual's right of access to the market, both as a buyer and a seller. All this class distinction stuff are part of Marx's inane ramblings. They don't even make any sense. Traditionally the shop owner, shop visitors, as well as the shop workers have lived practically right next door to one another in mostly similar condition doing mostly similar things. And more importantly people can generally do as they feel. Want to open a shop? Then knock out the front wall of your home, put up a sign, and boom - you're now part of this magical "class" of business owners. Some people even just set up tables outside their house and sell whatever they happen to like making or growing. And this isn't some vague ideal. In many nations throughout the world today this is still very much the reality, and it's awesome.

This is really the unfortunate part. So many people try to come to conclusions about economic systems and what is right or wrong without having any experience outside of America or similar nations. It's like trying to judge the civility of society at large when you've only ever lived in e.g. Detroit, St. Louis, or Baltimore. Your opinions would be misinformed, at best.

The Nazis were a large part of the reason that our technological development accelerated like nothing before, or since. We went from having never even put a man in orbit to putting a man on the moon in less than a decade - which remains what I think is by far the greatest achievement in the history of our species. A great evil created resulted in the most unimaginable good.

The times since then remained dominated by yang. We've had relative peace, prosperity, and our greatest threat was literally just a threat. And so now we are in an era where after decades of technological devolution we struggle to even fly a rocket by the moon, unable to come even close to replicating what we achieved with seeming ease some 50 years ago.

This position hadn't reached that critical of a juncture yet, but that's largely because Magnus just started winging it long before the final position. His position was much stronger earlier on. But even in the final position he was very much the attacker and Fabiano's clock was starting to run low. In practical chess, Fabiano definitely faced an uphill battle to try to draw that position.

It's a really ridiculous system and it's the consequence of the fact that regulatory organizations have started to become a tool for multinationals to exploit at their whims, rather than a tool to effect positive change in society as a whole. So it ends up in a system where individual to small business capitalism is hyper over-regulated whereas big business and multinational capitalism is regulated on paper yet laissez faire in practice.

Rules and regulations are not inherently bad, but as they grow out of control they rapidly transition from being a net positive to a net negative on society. Go try to navigate the thousands of relevant pages of legalese full of esoteric and counter-intuitive laws in e.g. California just to open a food stall. Your utility cleaning sink is only 9" deep? Time to shut you down, it needs to be 10"! In the current state of the US it's generally unlawful for a kid to go setup a lemonade stand in their front yard. The US has rapidly transitioned towards becoming quite anti-capitalist.

But of course this was not always the case. It's hard to pinpoint when exactly we started transitioning to the current era, probably around the 60s. And this is really the point. 'Not true communism' can not really pinpoint any era in communism as 'true communism' because the ideal and reality simply don't exist in the same plane. And while e.g. the 50s were not necessarily the penultimate example of what capitalism can yield, they were at least a really great example - as it was a time period that struck a balance between rules and regulations while not hampering individual entrepreneurship and innovation.

When a company has unreasonably high prices this enables competitors to come in and gain marketshare easily by offering lower prices. And you're definitely right that the company can do things like try to buy out the smaller company, perhaps put pressure on their suppliers, etc. But this is a never ending game since for instance the smaller competitor could then even begin to develop their own supply chain, etc. And a small company getting bought out for some fat paycheck before they even really hit their stride is hardly discouraging to other would-be competitors! So long as the pie and the end of the tunnel is large enough, there will be an incentive to compete against the monopoly.

There is also the innovation issue. Coercive monopolies do not often innovate. Their focus is on profit whereas innovation tends to be focused on competition. This lack of innovation once again offers a big gap in the market for competitors. The aerospace industry vs SpaceX are the best example here. Boeing/Lockheed had a partially government enforced coercive monopoly in a field with greater barriers to entry than practically any 'material' industry. Yet a guy with 'nothing' but a few hundred million and the understanding that something worth on the order of let's say $20 million of material costs should not cost $500 million to build and launch, was able to enter the field and rapidly rise to dominance by working on nothing but innovation and non-monopolistic prices. Boeing/Lockheed by contrast were still so stuck in the past with their MBA style executive leadership that now, many years after the 'threat' of SpaceX has become self evident, that they've still been unable to effectively react.

So to avoid retro-fitting the past to fit a narrative, I expect in the future we'll be able to spin an exact tale of the telecoms industry. Once again another [heavily government enabled] monopoly that's completely failed to innovate and charges unreasonably high prices. Something like the proposed SpaceX constellation of LEO satellites for the purpose of low-cost high-stability internet stands to leave them completely taking over that industry. Of course the failure of Google fiber is an argument to the contrary, but that gets into an entirely different tangent and I think there were many reasons for that failure that lay squarely with Google.

Braun was primarily interested in space travel, but it does lead to a good satirical quote, "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

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

A great example of this is the House of Habsburg. [1] They were one of the most powerful families in history completely dominating Europe politics with lineages of kings and emperors throughout the entire continent for some 5 centuries, including holding the throne of the Holy Roman Empire for more than 300 years. But the reason they're an interesting example is because they're also the namesake of the Habsburg Jaw - a genetic deformity that was greatly exaggerated in the family through the years due to excessive inbreeding. If you've seen a cartoon depiction of royalty they often are drawn with the extreme protruding chin, which is a reference to this deformity and family in particular.

That family was almost certainly extremely genetically fit at one point. But through excessive inbreeding they destroyed their own genetic lineage. In Spain this was especially pronounced with Charles II. [2] He was described as "short, lame, epileptic, senile, and bald before 35." He learned to talk at age 4, walk at 8. His Habsburg Jaw was so extreme he could not chew his own food. He, unsurprisingly, died childless at the age of 35 - ending 200 years of Habsburg rule in Spain. And to emphasize -- this is just one example. This family did not just rule Spain. They had lasting dynasties in Germany, Hungary, Croatia, England, Boehmia, Ireland, Portugal, and many other nations.

Today, the entire house of Habsburg is extinct.

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

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain

The whole point is that as we enter into an ever more connected world popularity of views start to mean less and less because "popularity" can be so easily faked. Imagine once there are bots that can compellingly market products (or ideas/politicians/etc) in language to the standard of a Tweet, which isn't exactly a high bar. Suddenly now you could have literally millions of "people" advocating for something that perhaps only a handful actually want or believe in. It's also perhaps presumptuous to imply that this technological milestone has not already been reached.

Even draconian ideas like trying to remove anonymity would likely do little to nothing since, as in the reviews example, people can simply be incentivized to play ball for what amounts to peanuts compared to the stakes for those doing the incentivizing.

But there's an even more important issue here. Even if there were some form of telemetry in Linux you'd be able to see exactly what it's collecting and where it's sending it since the OS itself is open source. I do not think many people are mostly okayish with purely diagnostic telemetry, but it's not clear exactly what Microsoft is collecting and their transition to a sort of 'free to play' style of OS does not lead one to the most optimistic views for either the type data they're harvesting, or their intended use for such data.

At least from your post it seems to me like you're talking about something like the 50s. You need only go back a decade or two to see tremendous differences in rates of psychotropic prescription and usage. And the sheer numbers here mean that if these drugs are as having as large a positive effect as many users do believe them to be, then we should be able to see tremendous macro level positive indicators. But I'm not sure we really do. By contrast I could certainly point to sharp increases in a variety of physiological and psychological disorders which are considered side effects of these treatments.

[1] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dear-mona-how-many-adul...

But there's a big argument against this that I don't see the answer to. Everything that's mentioned in this article is true for buying a house, but not for renting. Rental prices have also gone through the roof - and the only reason they're able to go through the roof is because people are able and willing to pay the costs asked. But people renting are getting absolutely no return whatsoever on this exchange, and rent is also generally not paid from debt. So how would this explain the willingness of people to pay ever higher prices for rent?

Okay, so:

- people claim that not being medicated for ADHD would result in homelessness and other such things

- medication only started to really take off in the 90s, and has since exponentially increased

So why is that when we go a bit further back in time, before the 90s, that we don't see some massively exponential increase in homelessness and other such things? I mean if that's the alternative to not taking the drugs, wouldn't this be precisely what we'd expect to see?

I think unforeseen consequences, both negative and positive, are a major part of how societies develop. We in general have nowhere near the foresight we like to image we do. And in particular, I'm more inclined to attribute China's success to their systems in large part because the only thing as large an outlier as their success is their governmental system. And the timing also fits quite well. If it's just e.g. open markets then it leaves you having to explain why China is thriving whereas most other developing nations following the WTO playbook have relatively little to show for it.

So yes I think it's completely absurd to suggest they've achieved anything short of remarkable success with their system of development and governance. But the question is what will happen in the process of this success and whether the path they've taken is sustainable or not. Is their growth indeed on the current exponential it seems to be on? A sigmoid where this wildly exponential growth will start to level off, or perhaps even something like a bell curve where the rapid ascent will be met by a comparably rapid decline?

Generally I think it's a great idea to have a diverse and multi-polar world. I have no idea whether the Chinese system of government is a good idea or an idea that will lead to the implosion of their society. And really I can say the exact same of the current system of government in the United States. By having various nations trialing out radically different systems, we can hope to see which is ultimately more effective by measuring varying sorts of results over time - and then learn and improve from our successes and failures.

In a world with a perfectly impartial and objective government, I don't think this is a bad idea at all. The reason it's bad is because governments are made up of people, and people are corrupt. While it may initially be genuinely motivated by helping to improve society, over time it will devolve into a tool for special (and government) interests to incentivize actions that are to their benefit, and punish those against it -- regardless of the objective societal impact of those actions.

We still have little to no understanding of how, why, and in some cases even if psychotropics actually work. And there are correlations to all sorts of nasty things with indications causality between things such as ritalin/methylphenidate and depression. Other studies on ritalin have shown neuronal/brain changes comparable to cocaine. [1] The only reason I mention this is because I think we're currently in the era of having a chicken and egg scenario between all sorts of mental/psychological disorders and a skyrocketing rate of psychotropic consumption.

Basically, turn to medication as a last resort and think about the differences in how you feel medicated and how you feel unmedicated. Now imagine the gross (as in total, not as in eww) effect of your brain over what may be potentially decades of usage of such drugs since the drugs won't cure you - they will just end up working as a crutch for an indefinite period of time. For some this may be the right decision, but it's not a decision that should be made with no analysis beyond 'Wow, I feel much better after taking this!'

[1] - https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nida-study-sho...

I think your point would be fair for more complex problems, but getting the max of a list is something anybody of a logical mind could easily do even without knowing any formal programming language. And for those that do know a formal programming language it comes down to the most incredibly trivial basics of a language - comparison/variable/iteration.

In other words a self declared software developer who can't tell you how to get the max of a list is not going to be a good software developer.

So back to metacognition. This is clearly phrased in a way everybody can understand as 'thinking about thinking.' The latter is, at worst, slightly more verbose. By contrast let's consider another fairly esoteric term such as 'cognitive dissonance.' There is really no way effectively communicate and convey the idea of cognitive dissonance, with all its nuance, in a comparably brief phrase so it makes sense to use the word. But metacognition? It's really just taking a simple concept and replacing it with a fancy sounding word.

I don't know why we do this in so many fields. It just creates artificial barriers to communication and clear conveyance of ideas.