EastLondonCoder

In the late 19th century people that went into science where actively discourage to study physics since many believed there was nothing left to find out. Without quantum mechanics we would not have the transistor, there would be no computers. The immense economic value delivered by fundamental research makes a 10 billion usd investment look like a microscopic peanut crumb compared to the potential value it can give. For comparison the combined world defense budget in 2018 was around 1.8 trillion usd.

A very simplified version of Austrian economics boom and bust cycles would be that central banks provides money too cheaply which leads to non productive investments resulting in a first a boom and then a bust when those investments don't pan out. Worth noting is that empirical evidence for this is slim at best. I think a better explanation for the 2008 crisis is that commercial banks mismanaged risk of mortgage backed securities. And I have a hard time seeing the current crisis having anything to do with cheap money

The biggest bang for the buck for me has been using functional techniques where immutability is perhaps the most important thing. A good way to get started is to make a project with react/redux.

I agree that high inflation is really bad, but during the last decade there has been several rounds of QE without causing particularly high inflation. The recent QE package from the FED is about 2000USD per person in the US, perhaps some of it could be dished out as a helicopter drop instead.

Yes you can but that's how you get bugs.

I used to work in the online gambling industry for 15 years and there are a large number of use cases on a gambling front end where you do financial arithmetic.

I have seen equality between 2 floats being used as setting the end condition for a count up win animation. I don't think I have to explain what horrible thing that lead to.

Interestingly enough the words exists in Swedish as well, spelling is a bit different but the meaning is more or less the same:

German -> Swedish

Wehmot -> vemod

Entwicklung -> utveckling

Einsam -> ensam

Stimmung -> stämmning

Entschuldigen -> ursäkta

Aufrichtigkeit -> uppriktighet

Lebensmut -> livsmod

Ursprung -> ursprung

Liebenswürdig -> älskvärd

Note that Sinneswandel is missing not sure if there is a direct translation in Swedish

I like Robert Fisk, he is hell of a solid correspondent but on this case he is absolutely wrong.

The Douma gas attack has been investigated not only by the OPCW, but by organisations such as the UN, the Red Cross and pretty much all serious journalism from the BBC, NYTimes to The Times and Wall Street Journal. They all agree that the Syrian Governmant gassed its own people i Douma.

The consensus is overwhelming, the wiki page on the incident lists 119 sources. I obviously haven't checked all of them but most look credible to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douma_chemical_attack

A casino makes its money on the house edge which is for example for European Roulette 1/37. If you win on a single bet you get 36 times in winning. But you do have the number 0..36 on the wheel so 37 numbers. If you are good at counting cards the casino will have a negative edge and if all customers would be doing that it would lose money over time.

JavaScript dev with 19 years of experience. I've built high performance 2d game engines, 2 poker clients and quite a few MVC frameworks. I like functional techniques, react/redux, react hooks, clojurescript. Somewhat unusual is that I tend to enjoy and be good at the last slog of a development project, to get the application in front of users.

Location: Sweden

Remote: Preferred

Relocate: Not right now but perhaps in a few months

Technologies: JavaScript/ClojureScript, React/redux or hooks. Comfortable with all web tech.

CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonatanwallgren/

Email: jonatan dot wallgren at gmail

Its the old Human Nature argument. There is no definition on what this fabled Human Nature is and I find it incredibly boring to reduce the nature of our species to one aspect of us, most people are selfish from time to time. But if selfishness is what define us, most people would be raging assholes and that does not square with my experience of the world.

Further reading: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/20/human-...

I do know people that can work extremely long hours and still be productive but they are quite rare. For a large majority of people a ninety hour work week, would be extremely counter productive at best but most likely dangerous for your mental health.

https://www.popsci.com/work-week-hours-productivity/

I think this has to do with the Great Recession. Prolonged economic insecurity is associated with a poor mental health. And that is in turn associated with self medication with things like alcohol and opioids.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4741013/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4151244/

You are probably right, but the battlegroups seems vulnerable to quiet subs though:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071116120858/http://www.knbc.c...

Conscription in Sweden was stopped between 2010 and 2017.

The only "currency" I know with a finite money supply is bitcoin. I may be misunderstanding you but there certainly isn't a fixed pile of Euro notes sitting in a vault under the European Central Bank. Money creation is essential to any macroeconomy, just look at the countries in Southern Europe. They have to deal with atrocious unemployment because they cant devalue. Germany and France certainly can. Sure runaway inflation is harmful, but in the choice of inflation in the high single digit contra 20-30% unemployment, my choice would be to lower unemployment.

If your case is that economic output is fixed I would flat out disagree. It's been shown over and over again that investment increases economic output. Which was very much the idea with Germany's Energiewende

You are right, can read more about one proposal here:

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

Because in order to make an informed choice in a democracy there are regulations in place to ensure spending limits and puts an identity on political advertising.

An example of what you don't want is the heavy investment in Brexit and Trump by Russia

Same reaction but different type of project and language. Immutable data with persistent data structures was a game changer for me. There is place for OO but it does feel like the last 20 years our profession has been suffering from collective insanity.

They are fairly quickly disappearing: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2510/see-how-arctic-sea-ice-is...

I think you should expand this absolutely excellent post into an article.

Not only companies, Sweden has this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Sans

As other people are mentioning it depends what country in Scandinavia. Sweden is not super expensive. Norway is very expensive but on the other hand they have excellent subsidies for electric cars: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jul/02/norway-electri...

This is very true, it’s also worth mentioning that all ways of faster than light travel means travel back in time in some reference frame which in breaks causality.

I have yet to see any ftl scheme that doesn’t break causality in some reference frame. I have a hard time fathoming a universe where cause and effect are disjointed, this leads me to think ftl is impossible. As other commenters are pointing out, c is not a big problem with long life spans and relativistic time contraction.

I have managed a disagreeable giver. I very much appreciated his upfront style and his passion. But whenever he was exposed to the rest of the organisation people took him as hostile and arrogant. Ultimately me backing him made me untenable. Moral is that working with contrarians are good but be careful.

The strongest argument for increased immigration is that most if not all of the western world has a declining population. Also its also not yet clear what types of jobs will be easy to automate. For example I think an assistant nurse would be very for a robot to do. A radiologist less so.

It’s an unusually beautiful written article, well worth the read just for the prose. As for the main sentiment that we have a new AI winter, I’m not so sure. My lay person view is that we see quite a lot of commercial success with these systems so the current wave will be well funded for at least a decade.

I like to be able to see film in a theatre, and as far as I can see the only way of having theatres work out financially is for them to have a short monopoly on screening the film before they go to streaming services. For me the combo of Odeon limitless and Netflix/Prime/Iplayer/BFIplayer works quite well. But I think that Netflix would need to be ok to release their productions cinema first in order for theatres to still have a viable business model.

Sweden has done it before very successfully. Also yes there is a limit on how many people you can sustainably take in. The Swedish government put on the brakes when the system couldn't handle more.

"Its overwhelmingly clear the main reason for the party is to turn Sweden into some sort of white nationalist fantasy where anyone with a brown face is not welcome. "do you really believe this? - yes. Anecdata, what relatives and other acquaintance tells me who votes for the party say that thats what they want.

You don't have to scratch surface particularly hard to see statements such as Zlatan is not Swedish, or for example what leading members called Soran Ismail during the iron pipe scandal.

SD has also been very open with what kind of society they want when coming into power, they have been studying Hungary and Poland closely, countries which has openly racist policies and are defacto not democracies anymore.

"Maybe it wasn't clear in my original reply but to me it seems SD thinks the way to save the Swedish welfare state is reduced immigration." I am aware of that and its utterly, utterly hogwash. Immigration is the only way to save the welfare states all over western Europe since we face an ageing population.

"immigrants don't get jobs the taxes will have to be higher. " Perhaps some investment is needed to get immigrants up to speed.

Look, Sweden went through a very similar immigration wave in the early nineties from the balkans. Those immigrants and their decedents have mostly stayed in Sweden and have today similar levels of employment as native Swedish people. It took awhile and yes there where real issues but I have a hard time seeing that the end result is no less than an extremely positive outcome.

"In the paper Refugee immigration and public finances in Sweden by Ruist, Joakim. The cost is refugee immigration and their family members is calculated to 1 % of BNP in the year 2007."

Yes some investment is needed, it will pay dividends later. And in the short term there was a very nice correlation between gdp growth and immigrants arriving to Sweden.