macspoofing

The article contends that the reason why the 'month rule' is in play is because of the logistics of ruling over a local population which will attempt to rebel.

So I think a mitigating factor for US, Canada, Australia was that the local native population was wiped out by old-world diseases, so there was minimal capability for local population to rebel. This is also the major factor of why those nations' population is largely made-up of the descendent of the colonists. Contrast that with Africa, which suffered from similar attempts at colonialism, was much closer to Europe, but because its native population was not susceptible to European diseases (and in fact, the colonists were decimated by native diseases like malaria), Africa today has a tiny number of colonial descendants (around 5 million European descendants out of a population of ~1 billion)

The population of pre-colonized North America was on the order of 60 million (European population was on the order of ~70 million). Had that population been maintained (i.e. not wiped out by old-world diseases), there was zero chance of European powers being able to establish large colonial populations. In that scenario, once the technological advantage was removed (due to trade, for example), I think you would have seen successful native rebellions.

I would say South America also follows this pattern. No chance of the Spanish being able to establish large colonial populations or maintain hold over native South American populations had they been not wiped out by old-world diseases.

>we forget about the existence of the control case: Canada.

Is it though? England did lose Canada to home-rule. In fact, I contend that a major reason why a newly independent (but also broke and fledgling) Canada was not annexed by the US was mainly because of the American preoccupation with civil war and Reconstruction, and the diplomatic efforts of John A. Macdonald.

>Because he didn't argue those positions because they were sensible responses to COVID, he argued those positions because he was reactionary.

You're impugning intent on this man, because you don't like his politics. You don't even know what his reasons were, do you.

>Coincidentally, at the time, they were the best methods we had to control against covid.

No. Those were not the best methods. It was never a choice of "Lockdows or no-lockdowns", even back then. We had 100 years of experience fighting respiratory pandemics, that we threw out and decided to follow the Chinese 'zero-covid' policy (which was an abject failure for us, and them). The traditional approach was a targeted policy. Protect (or even lockdown) high-risk populations, and let low-risk population live their lives commensurate to their risk tolerance. Sweden, one of the few western nations, to adopt this, was HEAVILY criticized for this, for no good reason. The idea that we would lockdown the entire population (healthy and/or low-risk) was something we made up on the spot. It wasn't based on any science.

>Masking is somewhat effective, even the cloth masks may prevent infection in passing. It's only when sharing the same space for extended periods of time that it becomes ineffective, and N95s and Surgical masks remain effective in such environments.

KN95/N95 - yes. Surgical and cloth - very limited, especially at the population level. Large-scale masking was MAYBE effective at reducing transmission by something like 10%. This means that it wasn't stopping anything.

>Before vaccines masking and lockdowns were the best things we could do to even blunt the death count,

Woah woah woah. No. That is not true at all. It isn't true now, and it wasn't true then. The policy of "lockdowns" (including school closures) or "no lockdowns" wasn't the only thing on the table. It was certainly presented this way, and ANYONE who dared to question that was labeled, well ... the way you labeled Herman Cain in the next paragraph, or worse.

The sad part is, we had a century of knowledge when it came to fighting respiratory pandemics .. that we threw out and just winged it based on the Chinese zero-COVID policy (even though it was clear as day that China was lying about its numbers and in hindsight their zero-COVID policy was an abject failure).

We could have done targeted lockdowns at high-risk populations, and while letting the low-risk population live their lives and take appropriate measures commensurate to their risk-tolerance. Sweden was heavily criticized for that kind of policy - WHY? Florida was heavily criticized. In the end, there was no difference in outcomes when comparing lockdown regions to non-lockdown regions - comparing Florida to California.

>They weren't misjudged prophets who knew something other people didn't, they were selfish people making selfish decisions who happened to be partially correct, but also made the problem worse than it had to be.

They weren't prophets. They were people who had major issues with the public health policy. And even if they turned out they were wrong (and in hindsight, they weren't wrong), it was disgusting how celebrated, for example, Herman Cain's death was EVEN THOUGH he was just a victim of viral pandemic, like millions of others. Him masking would not have made a difference, just as it hasn't made a difference to 70% of the population that, regardless of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, got COVID. The rest of the population will get COVID eventually.

Speaking of misguided prophets .. in July 2020, the consensus was that vaccines aren't going to be there potentially for years - so what was the end-game for lockdown policy? I remember that that time. There literally was the idea, amongst the lockdown proponents, that we could kill the pandemic by locking-down even though it was clear that was never going to happen.

Yeah - Musk says a lot of idiotic things, but even with that I maintain that these kinds of statements is not what drove Tesla (crazy) valuation.

>Did investors really believe that?

They didn't. I don't know what OP is talking about. Uber's self-driving initiatives were always a moonshot.

>We can only speak about "probabilities" here...

Yeah but this is colloquial speech, the probabilities are there just implicit because it would be exhausting to make this explicit in everyday speech.

>The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations.

Huh? What? No. That's not where the valuation came from. To be fair to Uber, they created a new type of market for which there was an immense demand for. Their self-driving initiatives were a moonshot and maybe got some people excited and therefore invested in Uber (see Tesla/Musk), but not quite the same as saying it drove their valuation.

>Tesla, ... were priced as if self driving cars are almost here.

Tesla was/is a hype stock based on the personality cult of Elon Musk that stemmed from being first-to-market with EVs. The valuation wasn't really driven by whether or not Tesla cars are self-driving.

>I've always wished there was a social network that applied some sort of "I am interested in [person] by [amount]%" premise, but recursively.

That's how they all worked in principle.

The "problem" for FB, Twitter, YouTube (and others) is that some people trust Alex Jones and since the 2016 election we've been in a moral panic around misinformation (Russian or otherwise). Our big idea right now is making sure that tech conglomerates choose for us the people we should trust.

>This was just a decision made in favor of managers over the poor engineers that will have to deal with maintaining a large Java code base over time.

What's wrong with maintaining large Java code bases? Say what you want, but the language is built for that.

The worst code-bases I've seen tend to come from dynamic languages. Try to maintain hundreds of thousands of lines of python or ruby code over several years, and see how fun that is.

>From a non-engineer view though, let's be real : nobody ever got fired for picking java.

No. That's not a correct framing. Java is one of the few languages that able to strike a great balance between performance, development productivity, 'debuggability", cross-platform support (i.e. works just as well under Windows as Linux), language safety, and library and framework ecosystem. Honestly, it's hard to come up with a use-case where Java isn't a natural right answer.

>Sounds like adaptive cruise control with lane keep (and insurance coverage, which isn't nothing).

Without the restriction that hands are on-wheel and driver is paying attention to the road. That's a BIG difference.

>But stop and go traffic jams in perfect conditions can already be handled properly by numerous companies' adaptive cruise control and lane keeping systems.

And do those adaptive cruise control/lane keeping systems allow the driver to take their hands off the wheel and stop paying attention to the road?

That was ugly. Musk should have lost that defamation lawsuit.

>I think the rubicon was crossed when the acquirer insinuated that an executive who went to bat for him was a pedophile. The executive has had to go into hiding.

Musk's antics notwithstanding (which will blow up in his face, in all kinds of ways), Yoel Roth is a public individual coming out of a high-profile role, who played a very consequential role in events surrounding 2020 election and January 6th. Musk's antics and trolling isn't great for anyone, but there is a slightly different standard at play here when it comes to attacking a public individual versus a nameless engineer.

In this case, Musk dishonestly defamed Yoel Roth, but did not call for violence against him.

>There are lines that we shouldn’t cross in a civil society.

The current culture war is all about what those lines are. This isn't an easy answer.

And this notion of ascribing danger to speech that doesn't call for violence is itself .. well .. dangerous. When Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017, that followed weeks of Democratic post-election messaging that Trump and Republicans will cause thousands to die if Obamacare was repealed (Trump was vocal about repealing Obamacare). Was that dangerous language? Was that a line that was crossed? If you truly believe that a political action will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, do you not take matters into your own hands? Or maybe we should have a standard where speech that doesn't call for violence, isn't a call for violence.

>Supporting blood libel adjacent

This entire 'adjacent' business is lazy at best, and dishonest at worst. We're all just 6 degrees from Kevin Bacon, so everyone is adjacent to everyone else.

OK - I'm personally not really torn up about it. Either this truck is viable in the market, or it isn't. If it isn't, then it won't do well.

I think it’s more that this truck is at the edge of viability as a long haul commercial vehicle. They don’t do things like this, and this truck doesn’t exist.

> We can only assume they overlooked it.

I don’t think they overlooked it. I think they designed the cab to be as aerodynamic as possible, so as to squeeze out every bit of range they could … and this dictated the driver position.

What are examples of 'low-code'/'no-code' approaches/products used by PMs?

That's one way to look at this. Another way is that Firefox lost market share, and is falling behind. Firefox is also the primary cash-cow for Mozilla. Given both, shouldn't Mozilla be investing in Firefox development to make sure Firefox doesn't fall further behind?

(Mozilla's non-Firefox products didn't actually make any impact thus far).

I don't think the hate is directed towards Firefox, but rather Mozilla. I know I lost faith in Mozilla when they posted a blog entry a couple years ago to detail reasons behind their restructuring and what their renewed focus is, and made it seem like Firefox was an afterthought [1].

Choice quote:

>Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. *But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests.* (emphasis mine)

What other products? The entire organizational focus should be centered on Firefox so that it can meaningfully compete with Chrome, as Firefox is the only truly open alternative to Safari/Chrome.

A little below that, they list their new 5 areas to focus on and ... no mention of Firefox there.

[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/changing-world-changing-...

Comparing a refurb Macbook to a budget Windows laptop doesn't really show that Apple devices are of "higher quality" - which was the argument OP was trying to make.

>A $800 macbook has far better build quality than any $500 Windows laptop

Took a peak at the apple store, there is no $800 Macbook for sale. So we're comparing, an older (used?) higher-end Macbook to a budget Windows laptop? Why not compare an older higher-end Windows laptop to an older Macbook? Why not compare a new $500 budget Windows laptop to a $500 used Macbook?

>Its Windows that's the issue for me. Having too many bad experiences and strong bias against Microsoft

You have a have a subjective preference - fine - we all do. So why pretend there is some objective measure here of Apple's superiority? Apple sells very expensive higher-end devices. The reality is that the quality of those devices is about on par with other devices in that class.

>Apple spent something like a half-trillion on share buybacks. They could have averted this crisis a decade ago by thinking strategically.

I don't understand the fixation on this. Share buybacks strengthen the stock price of the company, which the company can leverage in the future to raise more capital if needed (by re-releasing new shares to the market). From that perspective, they are better than dividends.

Besides, right now, Apple isn't strapped for cash as they have around ~50 billion on-hand and could raise more if they wanted to. So Apple can still invest more in fab processes if that's what they want.

>Think of the amount of complex computation must be happening for an elite gymnast for example.

By that logic, my cat should be trainable to a Chess Grandmaster level because she performs complex computation as she navigates my backyard.

>The subconscious is what I am suggesting we try to exploit.

Is there any evidence that a subconscious is exploitable it that way ... at all. Because learning doesn't work that way - especially for higher-order knowledge like Chess.

Not the point.

>Would it work? Probably not

"Probably not" indeed. Human brains need to be stimulated in order for them to build their neural net. Blindly following instruction is not stimulating.

>but our current approach (studying openings, etc.) is obviously not working

That's part of the current approach, not the full approach. Kids that show promise in Chess, already train with computers today (in addition to personalized coaching, and strategy study). I have no doubt that the current generation of chess players is best of all time, and that the next generation will be even better. Even with that, I don't think any human will be able to train enough to beat even Stockfish, much less Alpha Zero - just as no human will ever train enough to beat computers at arithmetic.

>The money I didn't spend on Twitter in 2023 was spent on something else, and for Twitter was lost forever.

Uh huh.

You're just playing semantic games now. I think we've reached a steady state here.

>if only because some companies already made new plans, allocated their budget, and aren't about to tell some other company that they changed their mind because Musk said "sorry".

How is that 'partially irreversible' ... a bunch of companies paused ad-buys for this quarter or maybe even next year. If Twitter becomes viable next year, you think advertisers wouldn't come back, this year, or next, or year after that?

>Well, if he couldn't afford it before making things even worse, how is that not an existential crisis?

That is the existential crisis. Not the incompetence, the lack of ability to afford Twitter. That would have been the case even if the early Musk tenure wasn't so chaotic.

>That's incompetence

It may well be. I guess it's a question of semantics. To me his ability to afford a money-losing company is the salient factor, not his chaotic early tenure as 'Chief Twit'.

>> As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis. >Why not?

1. Because none of his actions are irreversible.

2. If he acted responsibility, he still would be running a company that is losing billions (plus the extra debt he saddled it with) in a terrible economic climate. I don’t think he can afford it.

>It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence.

I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year. His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue loss, thereby further amplifying losses.

As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis.

The problem is that he actually cannot afford to float Twitter until such time that the company becomes profitable (if ever). Hence the drastic cost-cutting measures.