mads_ravn

I think number 1 is the essential point for anyone supporting democracy. Ukrainians, not Russians, decided who they elect as their leaders (1) and which organizations they want to join. It is depressing to hear people in democracies arguing otherwise.

As for point two: Yes it is also massively in the interest of democracies, that Ukraine wins and Europe is strengthened.

I think Stoltenberg summed up it up nicely in (2)

>So supporting Ukraine is not only the morally right thing to do. It is also in our own security interest.

(1) Queue Russian non-sense about Maidan being a western coup.

(2) https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_212041.htm

Isn’t it just a reasonable application of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”?

And I say this as someone really hoping that this is true, since I assume this would be great news for renewable energy (and we really need great news on that front)

Yeah, I also thought of Eternal September [1] in 1993, when I saw the claim to prescience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

> I will make one point: in the US, it’s never been the government’s job to build homes.

That might be technically correct on the build part, but the US government used to subsidize home ownership through loans as described in [1], e.g.

> GI Bill benefits that guarantied home loans helped many Americans buy houses and move into the suburbs.

[1] https://www.exploros.com/summary/The-Growth-of-Suburbia

Again, I don’t think we are going to end up agreeing as I believe that a significant portion of the Russian people are aware, that they are being lied to, but are to scared to do anything about this.

Please also note, that I don’t believe this applied to all Russians. The few I’ve interacted with more closely have been nice (the opposite of “shitty”)

Hmm, I fail to see how this is even remotely comparable to Russian propaganda/related to the topic at hand, but I’ll give you that the “West” has also behaved atrociously in the past. Though please be aware, that arguments like the one you are trying to make, has a distinct feeling of whataboutism.

Then we fundamentally disagree in how human psychology works: I believe that if authorities (be they government officials, parents or others) habitually lie and cheat, then that behavior becomes socially sanctioned as a way to get ahead. Thus you end up with more “shitty people” (and a worse society)

I’m curious: You don’t think that being continuously exposed to government propaganda and threatened with jail/fines for dissenting opinions will increase the frequency of “shitty people”?

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it —- Upton Sinclair.

But agreed that this boggles the mind. The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is lobbying by German industry.

IMHO there is a lot of value in learning the rules and then breaking the ones, that in your judgement does not apply to a given situation. A variation on Chesterton’s fence [1], or, if more literary inclined, the parable of the camel, the lion and the child [2].

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence [2] http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_thus_spake_zarathustra...

One party is currently torturing and murdering civilians, which tends to skew the conversation in a particular direction. Once Russia has withdrawn all troops from Ukraine we can discus behavior of other nations.

I’ve been sort of amazed by the line of reasoning as well: Russia can invade a democracy aligning with “the west”, but if “the west” were to, say, bomb the military in a country that is aligning with Russia (after ignoring election results and suppressing the opposition with violence), then we would be inviting nuclear war. Very asymmetric, but I guess that is the advantage of being an autocrat with a propensity for throwing threats around :/

You are of course correct, but speed does give an upper bound on how quickly you decelerate. Anyways, I got curious and looked up accident statistics in Denmark [1], and only ~10% of accidents that result in fatalities happen on freeways (where speed is highest), ~56% happens on country roads (second highest speed and more objects that will decelerate you quickly) and the remaining happen in the city. The authorities estimated that excessive speed played a major factor in 43% of the accidents.

[1] https://www.vejdirektoratet.dk/sites/default/files/2021-12/D... (in danish)

EDIT: 43%, not 46%

On the positive side I’m pretty sure that if you have a crash at 100+ km/h, then vehicle insurance is going to be the least of your worries.

I personally blame the robustness principle[1], which I think explains a lot of the accidental complexity in web programming.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

I remember reading “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and the “events vs time” plot (criticized below)

https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/

was the calling bullshit moment for me [1]. It is a nice thought though - if we just wait then technology solves all of our problems.

[1] https://www.callingbullshit.org/

Oh, I forgot, when looking at percentage of population over 65 both Sweden and Denmark clock in at ~20%, whereas the population density of Sweden is ~25 people/km^2 and Denmark has one of ~135 people/km^2.

In other words I will argue, that one would expect Denmark to have been hit harder, but there is one fifth the deaths per capita.

And I’m sorry that I am ranting, but this disease has caused so much dead and suffering, when it could have been stopped if we took it seriously - this upsets me. I was talking with a friend living in Taiwan and they’ve had ~750 cases in total with aggressive tracing and isolation tactics, so we know it is possible.

Quoting from the article

> The report states that the main factor in the problems in residential homes for the elderly was simply the fact the virus spread so widely in society.

With regards to the difference in strategy, there has been analysis like this

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227592/

Finally, and this is just a common sense argument, I believe it is clear that avoiding social interaction will slow transmission of airborne diseases. And lockdowns decrease social interactions (to a much higher degree than simple recommendations)

> Sweden has had a lower per-capita COVID deathtoll than European states with heavy lockdowns.

But 5-12 times that of comparable neighboring countries like Norway, Finland and Denmark

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

And by own admission the strategy failed

https://www.thelocal.se/20201215/what-does-the-first-report-...

This is completely fair to the subject: He got a tax refund for taxes paid for dividends, that he never paid in the first place. This is not a loophole, open to interpretation or in any way anything except plain old fraud.

Now you can fault the authorities for not having better checks in place (I personally blame, in the Danish case, a previous government for firing ~2000 “IRS” employees due to them being unneeded when a new IT system was put in place. Funny thing is the IT system had just been funded, when they were fired), but it is still outright fraud.

In the end I hope this will be a PR win for EU, as we can hopefully agree to heavy sanctions if he is not extradited.

Sounds really interesting. Do you have samples, benchmarks or other resources you can share?

This.

At least that is what I often think, when I hear people describing micro-services. If there is no data sharing between computations, then the problem is embarrassingly parallel [1] and thus easy to scale. The problem is not the monolith, it is the data sharing, which micro-services only solve if each service owns it’s own data. To be fair people advocating micro-services also often argue that they should own their data, but in quite a few of the instances I’ve heard described, this is not the case.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel

You can use an obfuscator (see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19163701/how-can-i-obfus...).

Note that you can still decompile the obfuscated code and look around (I’ve done so to attempt to debug a 3rd party library), but mangling all identifiers makes it quite hard to read.

In Denmark, a country of approximately 6 million people, there are three different regions running the public hospitals. Two of the three regions choose a custom system, whereas the third choose Epic.

The results apparently doesn’t favor Epic in that it costs 4-5 times as much [1] and has caused productivity loss 1.5 years after implementation [2] (links in danish)

Still don’t know if is a fair comparison though, since you probably pay the costs of adhering to process to start off with and only reap the benefits later. However the Epic implementation has also been bug riddled and I’ve also read that the procedures are designed for a litigation happy US and thus are not rational to apply here.

[1] https://www.computerworld.dk/art/248393/sundhedsplatformen-e...

[2] https://www.rigsrevisionen.dk/media/2104845/sr1717.pdf

Danish constitution

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Denmark

(Though it probably helped that the French Revolution had happened before ;))

Thanks for the link. But isn’t it sort of meaningless to talk about unweighted percentages? If either side applies an extremely high tariff for a product that is rarely traded, then it would have a large effect on the unweighted average, but no real effect on trade (though I suppose you could argue that it can affect single sectors in a devastating matter).

The best numbers I could find are more comparable, namely total US tariffs of 7.1 billion USD on imports worth 684 billion which approximately equals 1% vs EU tariffs of 5.7 billion USD on imports worth 575 which is also roughly equal to 1% [1,2]. To me that seems pretty fair.

However I think the biggest issue (as an EU citizen) is the US insistence on not adhering to EU regulatory regimes, which is what I think made a lot of people oppose the TTIP. Also note that this has not been an issue when negotiating a EU-Japan trade deal.

[1] https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/unfree-trade-tru... [2] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe...

Do you have any sources listing total tariffs on each side? I tried searching, but couldn’t find anything.

> Especially when there are linter rules requiring comments you'll have something like def open_thing(x, y): and a comment, "defines a function that opens thing."

I actually think those comments are useful in two ways:

1. The process of writing a comment will help often help me rename the function/variables so e.g. “defines a function that opens thing” becomes something like “opens can_of_worms with the given instrument and restraints” for the method definition open_can_of_worms(instrument, restraints)

2. You can use variable/return value comments to further restrict the domain of values, e.g. non-null, positive or in the range 1-42 (arguably it would be better to express some of these in the type system, but that is a different discussion). These comments show up in my IDE when I try to call the code in a remote location, so I don’t have to guess or remember the constraints.

(edit formatting)

I remember reading it years ago and thinking it was a large collection of straw man arguments (and this is perhaps too generous as it implies that there are actually reasoning present; in fact the story is more along the lines of: “heroes leave society, society collapses”).

Given this, it is beyond me how much attention and how large a following the book has gathered.