mercutio2

I loved the first 20-30 episodes, but at a certain point I got the feeling they had a very significant axe to grind on their supposedly impartial revisiting of some of the events they were looking at.

When they started talking about health outcomes, especially, their tone of "we know what's obviously true, our outgroup is stupid" got too strong for me and I stopped listening.

I'd be interested to know if they've toned that down, at all.

Uh, what?

If you are an anarchist, and you truly feel that McDonald's hierarchy is just as problematic as governments coercing behavior, OK, you do you.

But if you're not an anarchist, and you're arguing anarchists think this way... that is not the way any of my anarchist friends think about the problems of corporate hegemony vs. government coercion.

They are against both, but consider them vastly different problems, in scope as well as kind. Juxtaposing them and saying there's no difference... is not what any anarchists I know would do.

Why does your NPV calculation include a negative discount function?

There's no reason to expect refrigerators of constant quality to get more expensive in real terms, and NPV calculations traditionally assume a reasonable (and positive) cost of capital, likely exceeding the rate of inflation.

So I would've said 1000 + 920 + 850 + 780, or something like that.

Wikipedia is just flat wrong on the history here. Structural engineers created the phrase, and they meant type V, not five stories.

It’s true since the term became popular people have misunderstood, and it happens to match the number of permissible stories in current code, but that’s not what structural engineers meant when they started using the phrase.

Note that the “5” in 5 over 1 refers to what building code is in effect for the floors on top, not the number of stories.

Yup. My family is heading to Vienna for the same reason this summer. I wonder what fraction of attendees will be US residents?

I was in one of the 30 Days episodes. It was... very very very much reality-TV, not reality.

They made things up, planted things, and generally hammed it up to make things interesting. Still maybe interesting to watch, but not something I'd treat as accurate.

But the point is that Webb was vastly over-engineered because we needed to get value out of every ounce of mass at the very high costs of legacy launch providers, and even more compromised because of Ariane 5’s tiny fairing.

You could build Webb for vastly, vastly less money if it launched on Starship, not just per unit of mass; volume is at much less of a premium in the new regime.

You can’t quite fit ELT pre-constructed into a single Starship, it’s true. But it’s built out of segmented mirrors. It doesn’t have to arrive on station in one piece.

Are there really a lot of ground based telescope components larger than Starship's fairing?

I'm just not seeing the argument for there being any telescope function that wouldn't be better done in orbit, at Starship payload prices.

Do you have actual comps for Jackson vs Amsterdam?

Those happen to be two places my best friend has lived and worked and… 20 years ago at least Jackson paid much better than Amsterdam.

Europe just really has a low ceiling on pay, across the board.

Publicly traded companies create new stock, constantly, in the form of RSUs.

It is true that they aren’t technically selling the stock, they’re diluting existing stock and then using the created stock as compensation, but this seems like an unimportant distinction.

This does grant the company some power. Not obvious to me that power is nefarious, but it’s quite real.

If the label contracts were structured as loans that had to be repaid, I agree with "completely false".

But if, as I suspect, most contracts were structured as advances, then if the musician was successful, you could look at it as the musician just having gotten a loan.

But, famously, most musicians aren't very successful, and they aren't in general asked to pay back their studio time.

So I don't think "completely false" is a reasonable response to "the label paid for studio time".

My favorite author of all time. 80 years is a good run, but I wish he’d seen another 20.

I would’ve loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow’s End is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like, from 30 years ahead.

I wish we’d gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.

I have opened and built hundreds of lego sets over the years, and the only missing pieces I’ve ever had were in the Saturn V set. I think they had a QC issue on that set specifically.

Are you including the maintenance costs of the water panel in your estimate?

I used to buy this argument, but then:

A) PV panels got ridiculously cheap

B) everyone I know with solar hot water has emptied their systems because the maintenance hassles were not worth dealing with

Using high grade intermittent current to produce resistive heat isn’t high on my list of efficient things to do, but unfortunately neither is maintaining hot water panels.

This is not a credible source for even the (vastly different from originally stated) claim that billionaires are more likely to hold title to inherited wealth “now”:

- it’s a survey. Rich people do not generally agree to do surveys. It’s a survey done by wealth management businesses looking for new clients

- it’s a survey across an incredibly short time period, 9 years

- it contains the quote “While more of new billionaires' overall wealth was generated by inheritance, the number of new self-made billionaires still surpassed the number of new billionaires who inherited the money.”

Finally, most of the effect this link claims to measure is in mainland China. I do not think billionaires inheriting assets is the main policy failure of mainland China, and it doesn’t seem very relevant for a context where you said “As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited”.

Are there 1000 Nepali villages who have asked for a school and the local community thinks that’s what they’re really short on?

Or is that a thing you like seeing pictures of westerners building/staffing?

Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.

Your fellow respondent who mentioned GiveDirectly was at least advocating for a use of resources that has a strong chance of being net positive for the ostensible recipients.

Where did you get the idea “the majority of wealth is now inherited”?

I’m curious about your assessment of what fraction of wealth was inherited one and two centuries ago, and how you’re measuring the total stock of wealth.

Holding legal title to a thing is one extremely culture specific subset of wealth; being healthy, consuming goods and services is another, having status in your communities of choice is yet another, and control of the levers of societal power is yet another.

I am deeply skeptical of the claim that a larger fraction of titled wealth is now inherited than it was centuries ago, and I don’t see how you’d measure these other forms of wealth in a meaningful way.

This authors definition of HATEOAS as being “humans read some text” is bizarre and completely disconnected from what people were talking about at the time.

Here’s how HATEOAS is supposed to be helpful for computers:

1. Out of band, humans create complex, useful, well defined media types that cover the space of the functionality they’re trying to define. These need to be well documented. This is where the whole thing falls down

2. Once you’ve got useful media types, you build servers that offer clients a “service document”, a collection of interesting resources (with resources potentially exposed with different media type representations, so newer better media types can be chosen when they’re created in the future, without needing to swap out your server)

3. Servers also define a variety of useful verbs they support, which can also expand over time

REST depends heavily on (1). Since almost no one bothers to do (1), the whole project gets tarnished by people trying to do the later stuff and calling it REST.

I think carefully defining and documenting different complex media types is incredibly valuable, at scales much smaller than “the whole internet”.

For instance, I think IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, JMAP, RSS and other similar standards add a ton of value to people’s lives. If you build a true, extensible, REST in its original meaning system, you’re contributing to this grand vision of interoperable utility.

But I also agree with you that building interoperable standards is hard work with negative ROI for investors who aren’t trying to commoditize a complement somewhere. And so the IETF dream isn’t getting a ton of investment these days.

I’m a huge fan of (the original meaning of) REST, but… I agree with you!

REST is for building cooperating standards based systems.

Almost nobody these days is particularly invested in building standards to have different companies with different clients and servers interoperate anymore, everyone is focused on customer acquisition and monetization.

So there’s really not much point in creating and deploying solutions aiming at this kind of interoperable standard.

The folks at Fastmail are still trying to do this, more power to them, but they’re swimming upstream, I think.

Yet another retcon of REST that never once mentions MIME types, and thus missed the point.

All this gobbledygook about HTML “being REST” is silly and doesn’t match how things were discussed at the time.

HATEOAS is delivered by encouraging different resources to have different MIME types, and offering a service document that lets you know what all the resources available are with their associated MIME types.

That’s it.

It’s really not very complicated, EXCEPT of course that almost no one not intimately involved with the IETF ever bothers defining new MIME types.

This is unfortunate! It would be great if everyone would go ahead and document how their resources work, and then maybe we really could deliver on the promise of REST.

I do agree that reasonably consistent verbs and paths are pleasant things for folks reading and debugging HTTP traffic, but that’s about all they have to do with REST.

But it’s unfortunate we keep getting these explanations that somehow fail to get at the core of the original meaning.

Apple never announced a project to build a car. Nor did they announce the cancellation of a project to build a car.

Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.

Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.

More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.

Wow! I can’t believe I misremembered that so confidently. You’re right. So, my whole comment was wrong; no Tleilaxu until Dune Messiah.

The Tleilaxu are the only ones who make gholas until Heretics or Chapterhouse, and there is definitely a prominent ghola in book one.

We don’t see face dancers or high level negotiation with the Tleilaxu in book 1, that I agree with.

Normally I would agree on those timescales, but… the whole point of God Emperor is stultifying stasis, specifically to build up so much tension that humanity explodes outward.

So in this case “language stood still” doesn’t seem particularly out of place.

The books decline in quality very, very sharply. So much so that after loving the first book, I almost didn’t watch the TV series because the last book seemed like it was phoned in by a ghost writer and left a bad taste in my moth about the competence and vision of the author.

But the first book was great, and so is the show!

The original text did not include the word “directly”, which, ironically, is the reason your quote is not direct, and directly vs. indirectly is the substance of our disagreement.

Apple employees most certainly cannot talk publicly about unreleased products. Including loudly discussing their roles in restaurants.

You keep arguing with a strawman. I’m not sure why.

No one is saying “advanced” environmental laws directly conflict with building specific projects. First, I would never call these laws advanced. They’re bad laws, in my opinion.

Second, what they do is not forbid specific designs. Instead, they allow many different entities to exercise fairly arbitrary veto power over large projects, unless their idiosyncratic demands are met.

To first order approximation, it is the idiosyncratic demands of unpredictable groups of complainants with the power to use lawsuits to delay projects, that lead to large bespoke projects.

The core of the argument is that the folks planning and designing those projects are responding to the threat of lawsuits. Most other countries have one feedback period, rather than allowing an arbitrary number of unknown groups to embroil projects in delaying lawsuits at many different points during planning and construction.