ab5tract

And in that respect, it was a deviation from the propaganda of previous eras, which did in fact frame efforts as building and defending positive things in space.

Can you clarify how a 3600 is worth 2x its original cost and no one is already arbitraging the profit differential?

I fully believe you, but I want to _understand_ you.

TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?

What is the alternative that you are proposing? When I read something like this all that comes across is a strident desire for totalitarianism.

Are you seriously wondering why a government would want to underreport unemployment?

Edit: it must just be a happy coincidence that U6 has never been lower than U3.

They use U3 because it makes them look better and since no one is using the more accurate U6, there is no pressure to stop cooking their books.

Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.

Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports?

It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.

Since there are zero devices that are released that don’t indicate recording, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to outlaw modification of recording equipment to hide recording.

You know, the same way we would be rightfully outraged if Apple was allowing applications to turn on the web cam without signaling to the user that the camera is engaged.

That’s all aside from the fact that Hungary was run by authoritarian minded people. But just as I think it should be illegal for cameras installed in glasses to work without an indicating light, I don’t see how this recording light situation you are describing is really such a highlight of Orban’s excesses.

Ah yes. A great example is how much cheaper and more efficiently our military support is since we fired all the military cooks and gave all the contracts to KBR and Haliburton.

People don’t work hard for crap wages unless you beat them with a stick. Government jobs are seen as cushy because there are actual rules and regulations being followed as to how much work should be done. Corporations just skirt that, do a worse job, and then spread your type of propaganda everywhere.

People wouldn’t be jealous of the government job holders if they could achieve a similar work life balance at Joes Tree planting service.

That metric is so gamed it doesn’t even make sense. If you’ve been out of work for 6 months (or is it 12) you just fall off the metric. So the entire homeless population of the US is not counted as unemployed. That’s been baked into the metric for decades and they have only gotten more discriminatory as to who counts as unemployed since.

Respectfully, I would like to see a source or at least the math for that.

This is absolutely untrue. The rational actor model is no longer supported by evidence. In fact, it’s supported by no evidence.

Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts.

You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with this word colonist. The mass graves are either “imported criminal” (being in debt was a crime) or slave populations.

And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.

And? It’s not like those of us on lifetime-prescriptions have any real choice in the matter.

Oh, there’s consequences? One of those is an almost universal weight gain measured in the dozens of kilos? You want help with that?

Sorry, it’s against Calvinist/puritan morality to help you with that by providing a medicine to counteract that. You need to do it the hard way (regardless of the statistics that show you will just be obese now until you die thanks to the meds which, I maintain, that you must take).

Ah yes, because famously no one has a modem in their pants pocket these days.

Internet built into a car is just another unnecessary subscription.

You would think that such a terrible, untenable, broken economy as I hear the Japanese economy described (oh no, it’s not growing fast! The horrors of checks notes equilibrium) would precipitate a very dirty landscape, vast swathes of nature torn down, civility breakdowns, mass homelessness, and a high murder rate, bridges collapsing out of nowhere, etc.

I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.

What? Noam Chomsky has been labeled a self hating anti-Semite by AIPAC. For decades.

And that approach famously hurt investors, the economy, and/or Amazon in what specific ways, exactly?

Making art for no obvious reason is the norm for making art.

KLF burned down a million pounds. Has anyone else in history done anything like this? Even if so, KLF’s in rarefied company because it’s not something that happens even remotely close to regularly.

And the amount of anger I see in people when discussing what KLF did with their own money means the art was significant enough to generate strong opinions.

There were so many contributing factors to those famines but my understanding is that it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping.

There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with.

Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.

Which is why fining the owners of the wallets should be a huge deal: they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.

It always baffles me that people have near religious faith in a Holy Satoshi that walks away from billions of dollars “for the sake of the game”.

If he’s really so unconcerned with money or fame, it would be far more interesting for him to build it up precisely to blow it down. That’s some cosmic coyote kind of behavior and that I will always get behind.

In a better world, disparagement would not legally refer to the dissemination of factual accounts.

In such a world it would only add to penalties for proven libel.

It’s a pretty simple concept: if the truth hurts, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.

NDAs theoretically should never be able to paper over illegal actions. In a similar vein, non disparagement clauses should not be able to paper over the publication of legitimate insider experience of terrible — even if legal — behavior.

Can you clarify what you mean? The linked website makes it seem that the majority MEPs of the supporting countries are on board. Are all of the (listed as) supporting countries currently under conservative governments?

Considering that Steve Jobs came with NeXT, the general consensus has been that their recovery would not have been nearly as significant.

The real what-if for me is pondering what might have been had HP and other vendors not caved to the Wintel cartel in abandoning their plans to include BeOS as a preinstalled OEM option. Microsoft was sued by Be in civil court and Be won their case, but it was too little too late.

It may be interesting to note: according to the prices on Amazon for books that are out of print in mass market format, there is a significant demand among fans of the form factor.

I used to prefer trades but have gone all in on mass market editions. They just feel better in my hands, especially larger volumes. Plus I can stuff it in a coat pocket on my way out the door.

And FWIW, I’ve found that the “printed by Amazon” editions have actually been higher quality than recent offsets. For example, the newest editions of Hitchiker’s Guide seem to have been laid out without any regard to the inner margin. It’s fiddly to read the first word on each line.

Meanwhile the Star Wars Legends mass markets fulfilled by Amazon in Italy and France have thicker, brighter, paper and clean margins.

For the mass market format, I have to take what I can get, and I’m glad that there are still reasonably priced editions available.

The Saturn was the bestselling Sega console in the Japanese market by a wide margin, so I’m not convinced that SoJ was the party pushing for a new console.

Fair points and thank you for expanding.

To state it a different way: yes, of course and without doubt their very presence affected biodiversity.

But you were talking about their practices, which tended towards custodial over exploitative. And overall these practices clearly supported biodiversity as a whole, otherwise we wouldn’t note the biodiversity of this region as anything special (see again the quote I took from your first article).

I apologize anyway for my slightly combative tone. I appreciate the resources you shared even if I haven’t had time to absorb them in full yet.

You said certainty but now you say probably. Which is it?

I never claimed that they had no impact, but it is clear that the impact tended towards neutral to positive because: a) the forest was still there; and b) it had the higher rate of biodiversity in the world.

Indigenous burns in California are recognized as being a net positive for the old growth forests and the biodiversity within. It doesn’t take a lot to extrapolate that the same was true in the Amazon.