Haha. I attended one of the lectures mentioned in the Wikipedia and I didn’t realize until the very end that it wasn’t a stand up comedy show.
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
13,323 karma · joined November 20, 2014
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
Israel has only recently become as strong as it is. Until very recently it could very well lose, and has lost, wars with its neighbors.
I disagree with the downvotes but it is very close to distracting the actual issue at hand by dismissing the more minor issue which is the stock price movement.
Lets consider the fact that after 10 years of Modi and the BJP having overwhelming majorities in Parliament, with Modi’s personally popularity close to all time highs, over a period where many external watchdogs essentially claimed democracy was dead in India, in an election where the BJP was expected to completely whitewash the opposition, not only did the BJP do worse than the previous election, they lost their standalone majority in parliament and had to form a government in coalition with other parties, and were a handful of seat losses away from losing to the opposition coalition.
In general the parliamentary system with a figurehead president as well as India’s extremely culturally diverse nature and weak federal government system, and strong judicial system, seems to have kept Indian democracy almost unreasonably effective relative to India’s poverty, education, and development levels.
He explains why he writes this, but this is an incredibly silly complaint because you can’t know what his expectations were.
> The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems.
Which the author had with Microsoft 365 as well. Considering reducing vendor lock in wasn’t a goal of what they were trying to do, it’s not clear why you’re even raising that point.
> The real takeaway from this is that it's currently impossible in any meaningful sense.
It’s not clear how you got to this conclusion in any way whatsoever. In fact, this is an entirely ridiculous assertion.
Essentially your entire comment is “the author didn’t aim to do what I wanted them to aim to do therefore the author is wrong”.
The trade off is we spend that money on fossil fuels.
And therefore we spend the money on more air pollution, dirtier rivers, dirtier seas, more heavy metals in our soils and air, etc.
So the comic absolutely works even if climate change isn’t real.
The only argument that’s left is the idea that we may possibly spend more money on clean energy than we do on fossil fuels for the same amount of energy.
However, renewables are already on par with fossil fuels pretty much across the world, and their costs are dropping considerably, even if we do not consider climate change impacts. For example, in the U.S., which is particularly unfriendly to renewables from a cost perspective due to expensive labor, new solar energy is cheaper than burning coal in an existing coal plant (so without even considering the cost of constructing the plant in the first place).
But the comic undersells its message even further. Due to the fewer steps it takes to get electricity from the energy of the wind or the energy of sunlight to your outlet, compared to getting the energy of oil or coal buried underground to your outlet, the actual primary energy we need will be lower with renewable energy. So the actual cost will be even lower than a direct calculation of the current total energy supply of the world to meet the same energy demand.
Your concept works in theory. What it fails to recognize is that in the real world, the primary factors keeping fossil fuels around are:
1. The power of the dominant energy companies which are trillion dollar business and include massive governments who have bought politicians to ensure they do not get disrupted. 2. Status quo benefits. The fact that they are the status quo provides benefits like people not being as comfortable with new tech, and the grid and other energy transport systems setup for fossil fuels. For example, gas powered cars being the status quo have led to tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in setting up networks of gas stations, networks of roads to carry the trucks that move the gas to those gas stations, and the many tens of thousands of trucks that have been designed built and are operated to carry that gas around. If we were starting from scratch, it would cost a fraction of that money to beef up the power grid to supply that power to electric cars in the form of electricity instead.
Ultimately the comic isn’t just right, it undersells its case, and the only reason we keep choosing the worse tradeoff even if we don’t consider climate change is due to market distortions caused by politics and the fact that the trillion dollar companies who traffic in fossil fuels are way more politically powerful than the future renewable energy companies, which are just little startups right now relative to the fossil fuel giants.
The fact that they are introducing this bill itself proves that they are possibly suffering from clinically concerning levels of delusion, paranoia, or brainwashing.
Whether you build the soft power ethically or unethically (and false propaganda could be one of the many unethical ways to build soft power) is upto the country in question.
And whether that soft power is deployed for “good” or “bad” purposes is also dependent on the actions and goals of the nation.
So it’s kind of as meaningless to ask whether soft power is “good” or “bad” as it is to ask whether a hammer is good or bad, except generally “soft” power tends to be a better way to achieve the goals of a country than the alternative (which involves the threat and/or actual dropping of bombs) and the methods of developing soft power tend to generally be better than the alternative (distributing medicines for Thberculosis, cultural exchanges, etc instead of building a bigger and more dangerous military).
The Internet is a strong and definitive counterpoint to this claim, IMO.
If the government didn’t create the open internet, we would all be living in AOL style walled gardens right now.
Thats nothing more than a racist TikTok trend.
Indians do have a different conception of public urban space which matches more closely with how the urban public in Europe would treat public space a 100 years ago, but that’s not surprising because proper urban cities in India are about as old as urban cities in Europe were a 100 years ago.
Is it though?
If I used stack overflow, for example, I still needed to understand the code well enough to translate it to my specific codebase, changing variable names at the very least.
Land - Land transfers are almost non existent since WW2 at national levels because instead of spending immense resource fighting over land, countries have realized it’s much more useful to make the land they own more productive. One very clear datapoint to demonstrate this is the massive shift of people from rural to urban locations.
We are not even close to maxing that out, and with populations plateauing in most countries we will likely never reach that situation.
Attractive spouses - Not really. What counts as attractive changes. But also, no matter what you choose as your marker for “attractive”, there are almost ceetainly gonna be more “attractive” people in a world where everyone has a basic standard of living, so even this can be grown drastically in a non zero-sum world.
Desirable jobs - Zero sum thinking hurts the broader economy reducing the overall number of jobs. The claimed problem with the U.S. bu the zero sum proponents of a shortage of desirable jobs is actually the opposite. The reality is that the US has built a society where all that’s left are desirable jobs and Americans are simply unwilling to do undesirable jobs. Americans could have easily competed with the Chinese, if they were willing to earn below subsistence levels of income while working 72+ hours of hard labor every week.
Instead the U.S. trades those jobs to the Chinese and took advantage of the surplus value these created for Americans bh doing jobs like finance, software, law and teaching.
The problem with the U.S. is pretty evident in the numbers. The U.S. is richer than ever. However, the U.S. decides to use the massive wealth it was generating and redistribute it upwards to a tiny percentage of people at the top of society.
This is domestic policy that has screwed Americans, not the rest of the world.
And the reason this domestic policy exists is because newer American oligarchs forgot the non zero-sum thinking lessons of the older American oligarchs, famously, Henry Ford, who understood correctly that for him to be richer, his employees needed to be richer.
Even if we accept everything you say as true (which it very well may be, so sure), you’ve papered over the crux of the isssue with “deportation may take time”.
No. Deportation takes no time whatsoever. ICE has been deporting people within hours of detaining them even in situations where they don’t want to go back to their home countries or their home country doesn’t want to accept them.
But even beyond that, the only reason it’s “taking time” is because the Trump administration fired a whole bunch of immigration judges slowing the entire process down.
End of the day you can make all the excuses you want. My friends who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the U.S. in the past are not gonna come anymore.
Literally no one benefits from this mess but all some people can do is defend the stupidest of policies and actions.
Wait, so canceling the account is a shift away from cancel culture?
What the fuck is cancel culture even at this point?
And for obvious reasons, bird flu infecting mammals is likely to be a greater risk to humans than that present in birds.
They last a long time, are cheap as shit, and extremely healthy with the lowest dollar per gram of protein and couple it with a bunch of fiber and whole host of beneficial micronutrients.
The point of closed source is that it allows the people doing the research and engineering to recoup and profit off their investments.
Which I’m in favor of.
However, considering currently the disproportionately overwhelming majority of the value is being captured by American firms, and the US has proven to be an unreliable partner, it’s in both the EU and China’s interests to eliminate the profit from this industry entirely in order to promote competitiveness with the US based front runners.
Especially now that the U.S. government is also talking about not living up to its NATO obligations.
This is not gonna hurt the rest of the world. Defense is where the U.S. exports a lot. So cutting back on U.S. weaponry will only help other nations.
The same is true of Tech. Currently the tech industry is global, but expect it to become increasingly national. Considering this is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the U.S. and one of its biggest exports, again, this is only gonna hurt thenUS economy.
And the US’s dominance in this space is so high the rest of the world will simply push for open source at no loss to their own economies, since it’s only the US’s profit making will be hurt.
1 - The only problem with DST is the change in timing. There is a spike in all sorts of issues including accidents, heart attacks, etc in these days. The change itself is a problem.
2 - We have constantly underestimated the need for sleep and its association with the circadian rhythm and as a result, we face a lot of problems. DST/Standard time changes were an effort to solve the problem for 1 group of people, Midwestern farmers, and imposed it on everyone else.
What we really need is to eliminate the DST/Standard Time confusion and then individual systems need to set their own times for doing things.
Those times will depend on the kind of work, the people jnvolved, and then depending on the time and the needs it may even have to change through the year.
But the onus should lie on my company and me, or my kid’s school and him to track what time they should be meeting through the year.
Today’s day and age you don’t even have to increase quality. You simply repackage stuff in a new social media friendly way.
I mean, just look at the success of Goop and the general “wellness” industry which keeps criticizing Big Pharma (which deserve a lot of legitimate criticism that need to be solved with better, not necessarily more, regulation) when all the criticisms apply to wellness with the added concern that they’re completely unregulated and have no testing requirements.
Not as sure about 1.
People are not having as many kids. And we haven’t seen a significant uptake of other forms of child bearing either. Options such as surrogacy, etc haven’t risen as much, and while those may be expensive, neither has adoption.
So it’s not just the child bearing aspect, but the raising of a child that appears to be an issue as well.
For example, the Precision touchpad, which was the first actual touchpad tech MS created, with Windows previously testing touchpads as mouses, has been released for a little more than a decade.
Touchpads had been around for over 4 decades and have been standard to laptops since the mid to late 90s.
And the worst part is that MS still allows hardware vendors to ship non Precision touchpads today.
MS won’t allow you to run windows 10, but vendors can ship touchpads that only support decades old software.
It’s very hard to get Windows manufacturers to pay attention to the touchpad when MS itself isn’t interested.
Unfortunately, the Windows domination in the non Apple part of the industry means that serious change is only driven by MS.
A lot of advantages we think Apple has due to vertical integration are more because MS is pretty terrible
If I close my lid with 100% battery at the end of the workday, I should be able to open it up the next morning and get at least a few hours of work in before the battery dies.
And this used to work.
But with the same laptop, a certain version of windows has basically eliminated any benefits of shutting the laptop hinge.
Heck the worst part is the same thing happens even if you shut down windows. The only reason it’s now become usable for me is because I learnt if you do shift + power off that does a real shutdown, unlike a regular shutdown.
I do appreciate the concern. It’s very valid but unfortunately pales relative to awful atrocities we humans are enacting everyday in the billions.
Besides, having a cellular modem also allows you to tap into both WiFi and Cellular seamlessly like your phone does to make your overall connection much more reliable.
The question the paper is tackling is how human behavior today (limiting this to modeling interest rates) would change if people generally expected money to transfer from labor to AI.
A future where this happens isn’t necessary for this paper to be valuable. Heck, even if people never believe this will actually happen makes this paperback less valuable.
As an analogy, let’s say someone wrote a paper on how humanity could respond to a catastrophic hit by a large meteor.
This paper would be valuable even if the earth is never hit by a meteor while humans are still here. Further, it would be additionally valuable because the insights gained here could then be applied to other, less catastrophic scenarios, such as a volcano eruption that destroys a single city.