pie420

But that's the thing. You don't have to pay for cable anymore. And if you want to watch a show, you can subscribe for a month, get your fill, and then unsubscribe. You couldn't do that before.

Winning in Syria was helping Qatar build their Qatar gas pipeline to Europe, but Russia stepped in and didn't let that happen. It was too big of a threat to Russia's most crucial export monopoly: energy to Europe.

Korean War: won, South Korea was transformed into an american colony a la Japan, and is now used as a platform to counter China in the east as well as trading partner and military base.

Vietnam: countered Soviet expansionism and prevented Vietnam from becoming a communist regional superpower, Vietnam has not done much besides be a trading partner for the US since.

Grenada: won

Gulf wars: overwhelming victories. Destabilized the middle east, provided an opportunity for american megacorps to heavily profit and exert massive influence. Led to Arab spring which further destabilized the middle east. The middle east is essentially no longer in the picture in the game of global hegemony, and in large part has to rely on American refineries and american corporations to handle oil extraction.

Afghanistan: success, stimulated the American economy, very successful unemployment program (provided jobs for America's high school dropouts for 20 years), justified further weapons development plans, allowed america to build tons of bases to help counter China's Silk Road initiative by destabilizing the region.

Syria: mostly a failure at this point. The hope was to break Syria and build the Qatar gas pipeline to hurt Russia's hegemony on european energy supplies. Looks like that is a lost cause at this point, but of all the wars America has recently waged, this one is probably the most justifiable.

The world is no longer about winning wars and conquering territory. It's about destabilizing rising threats to your power. It's about toppling dictators and installing democracies, which are much easier to bribe. It's about countering your enemies/competitors (Russia, china, the middle east) initiatives and causing chaos in their neighborhood.

That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them the same genetics and life experience that caused them to become a jerk, optimist, etc.

The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc.

"Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.

But you're wrong. If you look at economic records going back to the middle ages, you can see the effect of Keynesian economics, central banks, social safety nets, social security systems, etc. Have had on reducing slumps and unemployment. We've gotten very, very good at it. In the 1600's, there were great depression-style crashes every 5 years or so. Despite massive wars, pandemics, geopolitics, and automation, economic slumps and unemployment have been incredibly moderate the past 90 years or so, and they have gotten milder as a function of time over that timeframe.

But Texas does have a tyrannical government and gun ownership does nothing to prevent tyrannical governments. If anything, gun owners have historical been those swayed by fake news and populists, so they will probably be the instrument a tyrannical government uses to establish power and crush democratic opportunity. Unless you allow citizens to own ICBMs and AC-130s, a civilian insurrection will never "defeat" a tyrannical government. Especially in the modern age.

Yeah, this is the truth right here. Capitalism isn't a system that optimizes human happiness. It optimizes production and profit, which can be correlated to human happiness, but in recent years it has become more and more detached.

The fact that certain countries can endorse global rules dictating what constitutes a war crime is pretty frightening too. Who are you, Lovecraft? Does the mere concept of global politics scare you?

That's such a privileged thing to say. You most likely don't have a serious illness or generic issue. You also probably eat meat. Most people have no issues sending billions of animals to painful hellish lives on factory farms and slaughterhouses so that they can enjoy a juicy burger. If there was a small chance of curing a disease that caused you pain and suffering every day, in sure you wouldn't hesitate one second before greenlighting any and all testing on primates.

Cliff Bleszinski worked on $100M+ projects, Martin O'Donnell did, so did Notch. Definitely still possible.

So are we pretending that abuse/sexual abuse of the homeless magically stops when they leave the shelter? Is it even logical to assume that there would be less sexual abuse in the streets than in a shelter?

What are you talking about? What their world country are you from wheres shitting on the street is legal? I'm fairly certain that public defecation is illegal everywhere, and probably gets you on a sex offender list in a lot of states.

The reason public bathrooms were eliminated is because they become dens for heroin use. Always fun going to the bathroom with your kids to find druggies rolling on the floor with heroin needles scattered about. How do you maintain a bathroom with homeless people injecting heroin? You need police for that, not simple bathroom cleaners. I'm ultra leftist, but this degeneracy of enabling drug addiction and encouraging crime and homelessness only serves to produce more crime, more homelessness, and more suffering.

That's literally everywhere. California has one of the most tenant friendly landlord laws, so if you run out of money, California is probably the last state that you would become homeless due to how insanely long it takes for landlords to evict.

"complete lack of real social safety net."

What are you talking about? San Francisco has one of the most comprehensive, robust, and we'll funded social safety nets in america, and probably on par with some Scandinavian countries. The amount of resources spent per homeless and crime-commiting citizen is world class. What do you think is missing in terms of social safety net?

Yes, because crime is so bad that almost every department, convenience, and grocery store has armed security patrolling outside and guarding the entrance. This isn't a thing in other cities. Even in the south side of Chicago. As a new transplant to SF it seems like shoplifting is actually encouraged here. If I was poor and broke, i would 100% be shoplifting every day. Could probably make a pretty easy 50k a year shoplifting tactically.

It's nowhere close. The quadratic equation, pthagorean theorem. Heros law, and a hundred other more simple equations are more famous.

Yep, it's really silly. It's really just saying we don't know, and here's a breakdown of all the reasons that we don't know.

Your line of thinking is exactly what's wrong. The fact that life emerged on earth shortly after being able to sustain life says absolutely nothing about likelihood. It could be a very likely thing. Or it could be a 1 in a 10^35 miracle that happened due to an insanely low probability event involving gamma rays hitting chemical reactions in just the right way. Until we solve abiogenesis and can demonstrably evolve life from abiotic matter, or observe other planets with life on them, this is all speculation.

The sun is a large fusion reactor. Eventually you will run out of mass in the solar system to put in your fusion reactor, and then you'll resort to extracting energy from the natural fusion reactor. A Dyson sphere is a fusion reactor of sorts.

Those high speed middle parts will get slowed down by insane air resistance down to sub Mach 1 speeds in a couple hundred meters would be my guess. Non-aerodynamic, non-propelled middle chunks are not a threat to battleships, especially compared to Mach 9 missiles.

Having your name be immortalized forever in history is something that appeals to a lot of people, especially billionaires who have run out of things to buy.

People pretend like HN is full of smart people, but then you still have entire threads of "I DONT CARE ABOUT DATA JUST LOOK AT MY ANECDOTES"

Yep, in almost every industry it was always been 50% how good you are and 50% who you know. Over time, who you need to know to be successful has changed, and new artists need to adapt, as they always have. Getting an audience is easier than ever in history. That is amazing for hobbyists who just want some readers and recognition, and not great for those who want to earn a living while writing.

Why do you prefer to breathe rather than hold your breath?

You can definitely do this with bills... You realize when a bank gets robbed the serial numbers are tracked and confiscated when they show up, and often lead to the theives

No, the real challenge now is how do you minimize the amount of processing power needed, or bandwidth needed, and how do you do all this while minimizing translation time to under 0.5 seconds.

Obviously accents and irregularities are also areas I'm sure they are focusing on, but I imagine that optimizing for real time, mobile and low CPU power devices is a huge focus for them.

That's intentional. Google wants you to recognize google, and google colors, and they want you to THINK about which google product you are about to use instead of doing it subconsciously. What are you gonna go, stop using Gmail?

The F-35 seems to be selling like hotcakes, from looking at the orders american allies have for the plane. Lockheed is essentially a wing of the department of defence and lot of the "project overruns" are actually dollars spent on R&D and technology development. Defense pork is bad, but giving billions of dollars to aerospace, electronics, and radar engineers is a fantastic way to maintain an economic edge, especially when Lockheed, SpaceX, and Boeing dominate the global market thanks to US government funding

That's a really silly and wrong way of looking at it. Tesla has down society and you a great service by including additional capacity in your car above what you payed for. If they choose to let you have it for free, pat on the back for them. If not, then it is no different at all from someone dying in a Ford Focus that was only front wheel drive where all-wheel drive would have saved their lives.

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