lores

The Traction Avant is a thing of beauty. Literally the only car I ever lusted after. Pure class, with a slight air of lawful evil.

I don't have any number on murder, but rape is a fantasy shared by 55% of Americans, women more than men, many/most of whom necessarily thinking about its logistics in at least some detail without ever doing anything to anyone non-consenting. On murder, the popularity of true crime media means many people enjoy thinking about motives and logistics. I don't think it's a small fraction.

I think the zero-risk approach common nowadays is insanely corrosive to democracy and freedom. If a million people fantasise about shooting the sheriff, and one ever goes on to do it, I don't believe avoiding it warrants creating an apparatus of mass surveillance. After all, if people were really serious about zero murder, the only practical solution would be to lock up everyone. Some (most?) tradeoffs have exponential costs at the limit and we/lawmakers should recognise that.

Nah. The first thing I saw when I walked out of Anchorage airport is a truck with a bumper sticker saying "my truck is worth more than your life."

Every bad thing in the US is a caricature of what caricatures were 50 years ago.

I like to tell people I grew up 10km from Canada, in northern France.

I admit I'm not a whole lot of fun.

Abandoned matches are reviewed by the relevant league, and depending on the reason and circumstances the match can be replayed, resumed, or adjudicated. When a side is judged to be at fault, the outcome is often a default 3-0 loss for them, on top of assorted punishments for the players/coaches/teams involved.

PPP the EU is also about 30 trillions, which is probably the better measure since we're comparing production for domestic purposes.

There's really very little you can do bar booking an alternative flight at great expense. If you're lucky and you know the delay in advance, at least you may have a chance to take the Elizabeth Line into town and go for a stroll. I'd count a fat hour to go from the terminal to, say, Paddington. It's a pretty area and there are excellent Persian restaurants around.

Or it would be gone. Or it would be in the hands of psychopaths. Europe trades off the extremes for a better middle. It doesn't produce quite as many big names, but US and EU economies are roughly the same size.

Yes, you're entirely right. One further, I was at a talk from a law professor at a big uni once, where he had printed the entire text of the Medicare bill on a giant pile of paper. He explained that it had taken him, a professor, several months full-time to understand everything at stake; what chance has a representative to do so, let alone on every bill? What chance has a voter? What does it mean for democracy that no one with decision powers understands what they decide?

"Educated" and "informed" aren't the same.

Democracy requires an informed electorate. Just having the right to vote isn't enough.

That's a common belief, but that duty is not absolute and does not imply the executive must choose money over morals.

These conversations about EU regulations, bureaucracy or general slowness and carefulness contrasted to American ease of doing business and raising capital always make me think "but... look at the state of America! Is it really something to emulate?"

My humble view: at high level in large firms, everything is politics. Even assuming high-level managers with the common good in mind, someone will sponsor with millions of dollars 10 useless but good-looking and inoffensive projects, just so they have the political capital to start one that is useful but may ruffle feathers. Your direct subordinate's failure is _your_ failure, and that will set back your ambitions. Peers turning against peers is frowned upon, for the same reason. And besides, you know them, maybe you even like them, the lower-level people are just anonymous faces, it's emotionally much easier.

And assuming they have the common good in mind is of course ridiculous.

Oh, pretty sure journalists and headline writers are also well aware of it, if for no other reason that every comment thread must be mentioning it. Their incentives are just to publish trash and generate engagement, that's all.

But causation requires correlation. In general, I think it's unhelpful to point out something so basic to or about professional research, researchers are well aware of it.

It doesn't give you 25% a year, because you don't have your investment anymore (or most of it, if there is a second-hand market.) After the first year you'd have a -75% return, after the 5th you'd be at an effective annual 4.5%, after the 10th at an effective 9.5%.

It goes up from there, but it takes a while to become an investment better than alternatives. Inverters start failing after 10 years, too, and they're half the cost of a $400 setup, I believe.

The American propaganda machine has done a good job on Americans...

In the immortal words of Ladré:

  Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
  Les aristocrates à la lanterne.
  Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
  Les aristocrates on les pendra.
  Si on n’les pend pas
  On les rompra.
  Si on n’les rompt pas
  On les brûlera.

These convenient and cheap book/game/video platforms sure killed piracy. Now that piracy's gone forever, we can enshittify the whole thing again! At least I imagine that's how it went in the meeting of 35 year-old corporate suits.

That's not what's considered waterfall, though. Specs are always required for any work, even if they're only in your head, even if the work takes 15 minutes. It's the length of the feedback loop and the resistance to spec change that makes waterfall, and by his use of tracer bullets I very much doubt it's the case here, if there was any doubt at all to have.

If you are on the spectrum at all, you have a high-to-very-high chance of being more clumsy than average due to differences in sensory processing.

They don't? I'm in London, and my local grocer will happily sell me one bean if I want. I've bought 1 bird chilli several times.

Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.

Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?

The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.

Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.

Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums.

There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.

I would switch to Codex, but Altman is such a naked sociopath and OpenAI so devoid of ethical business practices that I can't in good conscience. I'm not under any illusion that Anthropic is ethical, but it is so far a step up from OpenAI.

Change and progress like the people of France deciding they had enough of injustice and nobles' impunity, then? A little short-term pain for social progress? We agree.

A CEO can choose physical, mental, legal or financial violence against the common man. The common man only has the choice of physical violence. Without it he is impotent.