w0de0

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

Hey man, if gas is expensive you vote for the other guy. Democracy can be evil like that.

No, other cultures do not have a name for an extrasolar planet just discovered.

Moreover, the extant names from the Roman pantheon are universal within the international scientific community. They are also nearly exhausted.

I find it tedious to reject names from other pantheons. Not least because they are exceptionally cool - Quaoar and ʻOumuamua are stellar and divine names. Of all things, should not astronomy inspire us to grok human culture as a global and syncretic whole, as opposed to a parochial set of divisions in which English speakers may only use Greco-Roman gods?

Sure we can. For example, by generating enough greenhouse gases to insulate the planet and raise average temperatures. Isn’t this a website for engineers? A strange forum for mystical Gaia reasoning.

NATO reporting name “Gaydar”

To avoid blasphemy.

I don't think it is thinking 4 real

Crime and Punishment

Leaves of Grass

Persuasion

Foundation

The Diary of Lady Murasaki

The Remains of the Day

Travels in Siberia

Anabasis

A Brief History of Time

The Rebel

formulae :(

Indeed, we are complicit. Something to reflect on.

One can think of many better ways to engineer this protection, starting with the most common: lie to the user and never discharge the last 10%, shutting down early.

My Bose QC 45s have the most annoying low battery warning I've ever experienced. Beginning at 10% battery, every 5 minutes all input media is paused so a computer generated voice can inform me "BATTERY LOW, PLEASE CHARGE NOW." 10% battery can last for up to an hour, but woe betide you for trying to utilize the time.

It is an atrocious UX. It cannot be disabled via the paired mobile app. Do not buy these headphones!

Straw men are among the most insightful constructions; they expose the crow’s idiocy.

With Prometheus. Or: our cult of Hephaestus.

And why shouldn’t they be - What other proof is there of our wisdom’s worth? Tools are the most of our humanity; the all of it, for what is not a tool? A shirt, a city: all not animal is the animus of tools. All we are which we are not is holy tooling; it is then the wisest worship!

> No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market

Neither the billboards for Brex on the drive to Mission from SFO, nor those for Boeing in the Washington, D.C. metro, nor those “for your consideration” on the Sunset Strip come Oscar season, are meant for a mass market. This doesn’t seem a sound premise.

In being so physical, billboards are hardly mass media at all. More big brochures.

Australia has roughly a tenth America’s population and GDP. America has the premiere televisual media production center in the anglosphere. High bandwidth communications are essentially instant and free. Travel is short, and affordable for most.

Where is the mystery? It would take special effort not to receive such exports from a behemoth which speaks your language and lives next door. Inevitable diffusion. Consider how many Australian artists become also American, for instance.

Luxury brands have always made low end products for the petite bourgeoisie. Their products offerings are deliberate pyramids of increasing artificial scarcity which many clever people have wasted lives designing.

‘Just charge for the check mark’ seems quite likely to fail in the ways your interlocutor alludes. Moreover, this particular status symbol is explicitly not a marker of wealth, but rather of a more nebulous type of status.

A fair question.

I feel much of the mourning of lost trust in media comes down to crocodile tears (“concern trolling” - though I don’t cast that label on any comment here). The well meant and often needed pedantry of the informed serves the disingenuous demagogue readily. And the informed themselves are often distracted from a moral urgency by ambiguity.

Ambiguity is kin to science but alien to modern and popular modes of ethical judgement. This failure of critical moral thinking is the crux of media’s challenge when reporting on climate change. I don’t believe the hoi polloi distrust journalists because they too are current with the latest studies.

In our present crises, there seems to me a choice between hyperbole and bikeshedding. The latter suits the present powers, the former all the possibility of a future.

I don’t believe so. Few games take on the challenge of modeling battlefield tactics (as opposed to geo-strategy). In my view those of highest quality are a few of the Total War series and WARNO. These still far fall short for reasons of fantasy and feasible simulation size.

To model the Battle of the Somme with even some tactical fidelity is also likely not feasible within present constraints. I would look to niche war sim board games instead.

That said, one might be wiser to read the English war poets than search for such a game. The study of Great War tactics is perforce the study of a macabre failure in human imagination and morality. Even at the tactical level the war is proof of a human inability to learn and change - even when our choices lead inexorably to mass death.

Battlefield mortality was exacerbated by commanders’ fixation on 19th century tactics. Creeping artillery barrages and over-the-top frontal assaults were finally effective only strategically, as economic and political weapons. This was not tactical innovation. It was an upscaled iteration of cannon barrages decimating bravely advancing line infantry.

At their best, I’ve found Paradox games are indeed this - but one is waiting on the outcomes of an emergent system one has had only a part in guiding. This opposed to managing a holistic (modulo some rng variation) system, as in Factorio.

Ironically it is extremely bourgeoisie to have sensibilities which can be offended by a luxury consumable.

It’s sad, but we will simply never get past the point of rearranging the furniture while we argue about the accuracy of estimates of the iceberg’s size.

Why is this the font of your passion, rather than the desperate situation of our planet?

Though I agree with you that the US would not do such a thing, such assertions - even if written into state policy - cannot reassure an adversary. The US is, in fact, the only state which has used nuclear weapons in combat - it was the very first strike.

> it's still largely populated by well educated, intelligent individuals who are skilled orators and debaters.

Real ill luck then to find the one educated fool who is skilled in obfuscatory rhetoric for the latest PM. Reassuring to know that the rest of parliament is filled with educated good intentions.

> Forcing technology innovators adopt open standards is also potentially problematic.

And also, you know, the foundation of the internet and all it has bred.

> There are no experienced manufacturing workers… This isn't a matter of the price of labor.

Nonetheless the shortage may be addressed by increasing the price. Witness the proliferation of software boot camps.

I find myself confused this fundamental mechanism of free markets seems stuck for this market in this nation. Which hidden incentive(s) do I not comprehend?

Is it simply that decades of business acumen and planning assume cheap labor, anchoring executives’ expectations well below what is now required?

Constructive dismissal issimpky convincing someone to leave without the burden to your cowardice and the company’s revenue that firing entails. You are playing semantic games - your described practice is not something different.

It is dishonesty in the service of profit, the simplest type of corruption available. Euphemisms are always just euphemisms.

Strikingly absent from the piece, and in my experience from similar memoirs generally, is an explicit attempt at constructing general or specific theories of mind. Much may be relieved by turning one's conceptual skill to the task of modeling another's experience. This is best done with empathy's aid, which is most difficult to find when fixated on one's own emotions. ("Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.")

You set the bar, not him, by inviting the comparison. Moreover, the poster makes the point that freedom of association, a component of free speech, requires private censorship - a feature, not a bug.