psd1

I don't think that's right - well, Canada and Australia ofc. The "U" in "UK" refers to James IV of Scotland becoming James of England, thus uniting the states of Albion. Charles succeeded him.

There appears to be a crossing point, which you say has happened already, where China is the greater superpower. I think that point is still approaching. We do not disagree by much.

I'm not a military buff, but a couple of tubers say that China's navy includes a lot of coastal tonnage.

In China's favour, they seem to be getting more R&D "purchasing power". Against them, the demographics. The space race is wide open. I could believe they have the space military advantage, but frankly, if you can lift tonnage into space then you can drop tonnage onto cities from orbit.

Do not underestimate the power of Hollywood to set the frame for political conversations everywhere. Apart from anything else, immigration is America's safety net against demographics.

Europe exported culture approximately everywhere

It's not vital at all. The authority cones from having people who will lock you up if you disobey.

The fact that the language is "flowery" is an attempt to convey strict semantics using human language. The Latin tenor of legal language in Anglophone countries is a historical quirk. The wigs are because the legal profession is inherently backward-looking and there was a time when such wigs were normal. The theatricality of all this is incidental; a court's authority depends on none of it; it's the men with batons and guns.

Every policy has winners and losers. There is no set of policy that any single voter supports entirely. Getting elected is a game of eliding over details so that you remain rosy-tinted and so that you don't get mauled on bikeshed details. Governing is a game of horse-trading to get as many policies that you like implemented with as few as you don't like.

In that context, no politician with perfect integrity can be successful. People with information but who lack nuance will always be outraged that their candidate sold out.

When you sarcastically call politicians scum, it adds no fucking information. The politician that you like cannot exist.

I have no difficulty with condemning anyone who joined Epstein in his crimes. I also have little difficulty in tolerating anyone who worked with him while unaware of his crimes. In between, there's an enormous grey area based on whether or not you shun people based on rumour. How many rumours went round your school, and how many of then did you believe?

> then why trust them to decide who makes & enforces laws?

Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.

Historically:

We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.

Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.

Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.

I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.

I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.

We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.

I scorn trump as much as the next socially-adjusted human, but this is overstated:

> he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years

America is still the most powerful military force and the largest economy, and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots. A beast that size keeps lumbering a long time after brain death.

Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore. Ignoble but not ignorable.

If we run the clock forward, then declining arms exports due to sovereignty concerns wool make the USian defence industry harder to sustain. But that takes decades to play out.

Total FUD. Nobody would tolerate that. I would not tolerate that.

If it adds more than 2ms to invocations, post your $profile script.

When there's a retail-grade desktop os built with capabilities as a foundational feature, it will want a shell with appropriate primitives and an ergonomic syntax for them.

Pwsh is not the last word on shells, but it does have automatic cast from string to FileInfo. Ergonomically, it kicks the shit out of legacy shells.

JOIN US. FEEL THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE.

Pirates of the Spanish Main, Pieces Of Eight popular conception wanted plunder, and gold was being shipped in fat galleons. Fiat currency was not available for them to plunder, because banknotes were not, in any significant commune, mined in Spain's new-world colonies and transported to Castile.

Pirates were not necessarily stateless. Drake sailed with a letter of marque. I'll grant there may be contemporary pirates off the horn of Africa who would be hard pressed to obtain a passport.

Blackbeard's thoughts on financial mechanisms are lost to us, sadly.

I think you're trying to explain that fiat currency is predicated on trust. Thanks; that cleared up some misconceptions.

Unfortunately, it turns out that crypto is also, on inspection, predicated on trust: chiefly, trust in the infosec of whatever party maintains your wallet. That trust has been violated maaany times. I've also personally formatted a disk holding a decent chunk of coin (fuck me for trusting myself).

A better analogy would be if gold could spontaneously vaporise and escape any container. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to contain - it would be a more accurate metaphor.

Sure, but is your system compromised because someone left a key in plaintext? Attack surface is finite and can be meaningfully reduced.

Well yes, people should be stakeholders of the state...?

I agree that high state control will give rise to a different kind of owner class. But that's a balancing act. Defence is widely agreed to be the state's business; industry is widely agreed to not, mostly, be the state's business. We're all in an Overton window, right?

I buy ex-corporate machines for my family; they always have pxe enabled. I've got a handful of optiplex micros running my home shit. All of those.

"The broad-spectrum surveillance and social-credit state predicated on technofascists working hand-in-glove with repressive government" is a bit of a mouthful. "Flock" is an elision.

That provokes a memory! IBM shipped a thinkpad (W700) that had a smaller screen pop out from behind the main screen.

https://i.redd.it/tv8gify0w11c1.png

Your dream phone sounds cooler. Dreaming about phones is probably not "cool", mind ;-)

That's technically cool; many nerds don't appreciate the wizardry that exists in finance. But this is really an ethical discussion. The "more people" are still the richest members of society, and society is far from fully meritocratic. Should we allow inequality to increase unchecked?

I can see arguments that the Walton family deserves to be ludicrously rich. I don't see why they should have access to tax avoidance strategies unavailable to Bertie the Janitor. I also don't see why someone merely Porsche-rich should have access to those, either.

Doesn't the NSA have wiretaps in every ISP? Gag orders, secret courts? Do i remember wrong: the NSA backdoored a cipher suite?

I'm comfortable with the idea of my own country conducting espionage. I can believe that China does it more; but the idea "we would never" is naive.

Survivorship bias explains that. The list of dictators-for-life does not include those who don't become dictators for life.

I'd suggest that term limits are party of a package that rests on strong public faith in democratic institutions. E.g. Macron is about able to hang on, but i doubt he could stay past an electoral defeat because he presides over a nation that won't tolerate it.

Exactly this; the job of civil service is to retain institutional competence, and to offer cabinets digests and levers to pull that they can operate at high level.

Day one:

- your predecessor had this and this initiative, see pages 4 to 7 - i don't like that, what alternatives exist - we worked this up at the time, here are the projections which were updated six months ago - good, do that instead - we'll need to redo the numbers - then do so, and brief me again next week

There have always been bad parents. There have always been parents who dgaf; there have been parents unable to cope; there have been earnest but misguided parents.

Meanwhile, the majority of parents care deeply and are doing their best at a difficult charge. They instill a grounding in contemporary consensual morals, which is all they have ever been able to do. The idea that they have, en masse, "abdicated a sacred duty" is cheap. I'll stipulate that tablets are bad. I don't agree that morals peaked in some edenic past.

I mean, peak father-son time was sending the boys down the mines with their dads. I'm not convinced that screen time is worse.

I regret the industrial revolution as much as the next crunchy hipster, but finding a nice stick to beat it with is not going to raise the floor. Whatever dogma you fancy, the groups you most want to ram it into will never even hear it. Parents who use tablets as pacifiers so they can smoke meth or watch telly are not going to change because you shout at them about the arts and crafts movement. Neither are parents working two jobs without support networks. If you're right, you're pointlessly right.

The impressive growth is plausible, but it also rhymes with "bubble". There is obviously a value proposition in there, but I'm skeptical it's a trillion-dollar one. It's a machine for turning electricity and silicon into powerpoint and spotify slop

Government trying to manage financial markets is like trying to steer a rampaging rhino; finance is stronger than government, and can wreck it. But some politicians want to increase regulation and some want to reduce it. Some cynicism is fair, but you've overstated the case. Elections do not offer infinite choice, but the choices are distinct.

Language is funny: where did you first encounter "datums"? Do you intend a semantic distinction from "data"?

You came across as arrogant in your comment to tourmalinetaco, as if you are a great educator let down by the intellectual inadequacy of your acolytes. In truth, your conflation of "amount" and "target" muddies the concept you are trying to convey. If you wish to be brief, be precise.

You are so determined for me to be wrong that you've tied yourself in a knot.

This is not an ad hominem, it is a direct criticism of your attitude.

The optimal _target_ for fraud is not zero. That's the aphorism. The optimal _amount_ of fraud is indeed zero, for most value systems. You had to spell it out because you were imprecise.

You come across as one borrowing patio11’s coat. He's a great blogger. You aren't.

I'd be sympathetic to this argument in 2008. Apple has made hay. On the slider between "incentives for entrepreneurs" and "good for the people", you've bent the metal at one end.

> ... centrist governments ... shoulder any blame

I agree somewhat. However, the fault of mainstream politics is one of failure. The fault of extraterritorial actors is one of action.

I think that mainstream governments in the rounds haven't done enough for hoi polloi in the past few decades, but also that perceptions of what they could have fine may often be unrealistic. There are many prophets - some shallow thinkers might say "just read [ Das Kapital | Friedman ] and do that", but i don't agree that ideology delivers the benefits it promises.

It was a tall order to expect the past few decades of governing parties to satisfy the people enough that they don't turn to AfD shit.

Mainstream politicians' capital comes from votes, an expensive and limited resource. Extraterritorial actors do not have this constraint.

Where i end up is: yes, we should blame tired neoliberal parties for failing the people and driving then to charlatans. But that blame should be tempered by an understanding that government is a game that never leaves everybody satisfied. But extraterritorial actors? They are somewhere between philosophically vacant and hostile, and they are fucking with us just because they can. The blame is categorically greater.

Much as i hate being advertised to, i do like the existence of trade, and of new products. In the old days, you would take your products to market once a week on a cart, and the market would pass by your stall. That isn't how it works any more.

Generally, how can society discover new products and services?

I would be open to having some kind of directory that i could browse at my own convenience, but that's ultimately going to devolve to paid placement.

As it happens, the itch resurfaced and i just discovered winboat! It appears to be the exact counterpart to WSL, what a lovely symmetry.

I built my desktop. I do own an unused retail windows licence, and i think I've even activated windows on this box, but the key is not in the BIOS. I'm curious how that's going to work.

Tangent, in case my folly gives you a chuckle: my mouse, of the windows-only reprogramming tool, is a zerotes c18. I got busy with a dremel and did a _side project_ on it, only to discover that the thumbstick has only 1-key rollover. It's useless as a controller pad because it only supports the cardinal directions. I am a silly billy.

But not between buying a car and marching with blackshirts?

I take it Ford drivers are also Nazis? Henry Ford admired Hitler and advocated for eugenics in America. VW and Porsche, obvs.

Or have these marques aged out? When was the cutoff? Beatniks in air-cooled vauvi buses, all nazis? Jared Holt on youtube, fixing his wrecked 356? Did vw stop being a Nazi endeavour on VE day, or do they remain an overt wing of the third reich in the 21st century? Or was the changeover day the 19th of March of 1982?

You're going to hate the Marshall Plan when you learn about it. You're going to hate the Apollo program. Fucking Nazis, landing on the moon, makes me sick.

Are Tesla shareholders nazis? Where's your fucking pension, gumby? You'd better be whiter than the driven snow, you self-satisfied prat.