rumcajz

In other news:

> The websites of the Kremlin, the government, the State Duma and the Federation Council, the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Investigative Committee, and also Roskomnadzor itself stopped opening for users. At the same time, the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said that there were no problems with access. "We have seen the messages, but, to be honest, they have not been confirmed with us. Because here I am now ... no, everything opens up for us."

That was helpful. Thanks!

I am from Slovakia and the country is pretty corrupt. But I feel that the moral boundary is somewhat different. In Eastern Europe, preferring your friends and family is more acceptable, whereas in the US it seems to be stuff that could be classified as, maybe, "lobbying" or "ecnomics".

I've meant what is considered morally acceptable by an average American. I guess that you are describing who manages to get away with the corruption, rather than asserting that bribery by the rich is considered more acceptable that the bribery by the poor.

I have hard time understanding what goes for the bribery in US. Apparently, a lot of stuff that would be considered corruption in Europe is just business as normal in the US. In this particular case I would guess that what they did would be considered OK. Apparently it wasn't. Can someone from the US comment on where the boundary between what's OK and what's not lies?

Not being able to scale is one of the arguments that are often being use to dismiss Swiss political system, without much further explanation. However, where is the bar? I mean, I would understand if there was a limit somewhere around the Dunbar's number, but why would something that scales to 8 millions not scale to 20 or 50 millions?

Because likely to elicit reworking of the proposal you would need less than 50% of the vote. To defeat the proposal you need at least 50%.

That sounds exploitable. People would strategically vote "I don't understand" to delay the initiative.

There's going to be a long section about the Blocher case in part III. However, honest question: Do you see SVP succeeding in polarizing the society? How exactly? Have the friends voting for SVP started treating you as an enemy? Do you fear expressing your opinion at particular places? Etc.

"More than you ever wanted to know" is a great name for an article format, where a single topic is explored in depth. I don't think there's any other term with that meaning in English, except, maybe, "monograph", but that doesn't make such a nice title.

Author here: At multiple places people pointed out that there are elements of the system missing from the article. Please note that there's going to be part II. (on decentralizaton, subsibiarity principle etc.) and part III. (on concordant democracy, magic formula, collegiality principle etc.)

I agree that the analogy is fruitful, but you have to look at a big ancient codebase full of spaghetti code, dead code, code that nobody knows about and so on. Parts are in COBOL and assembly, parts are in JavaScript. There are shims on top of shims and a lot of mutually interacting half-assed attempts to rewrite the codebase. With that kind of system you get a glimpse at how a biological system looks like.

Interesting problem. It would be partly solved by the look-and-look-back protocol, because then it's obvious that you are speaking to a single person. But then, it could still happen that you accidentally avert your gaze and drop back to the common chatroom, making what you are saying audible to everyone.

OTOH, I, as an introvert, appreciate presence of extroverts at parties because they divert attention to themselves and thus create kind of sheltered zones around themselves, quite comfortable for introverts to be in.

The mention of goverment having control of the currency in the discussion about Austria reminded me of the Worgl experiment: view-source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl#The_W%C3%B6rgl_Expe...

One Eco's book relevant, IMO, for programmers: "The search for the Perfect Language". In a way, it can be thought of as a prequel to the history of programming languages.

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Perfect-Language-Umberto-Eco/d...

One thing I heard (not sure whether it's true) is that in Ottoman empire, when I child died, parents often used the his or her birth certificate for the next child. That way they could avoid all the associated paperwork.

> A robot cashier, though, changes the equation: It “gives the false impression of anonymity,”

OTOH, a human cashier gives the false impression of personhood to a corporation.