anon7725

> Despite China having a vast coastline, they do not have access to the open seas.

I didn’t realize that Okinawa is halfway between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan, and the Japanese territorial waters extend right up to the Taiwanese EEZ on account of Japan’s far-flung southern islands.

I think Americans have the most variety of names for roads - kind of like the Inuit have many ways to talk about snow.

Parkway, Freeway, Highway, Tollway, Expressway, Interstate, Byway, etc

I rewatched WarGames recently. It holds up and is worth watching again. In particular with our current concerns over AI it feels ahead of its time.

And on that day their first priority is securing a good open source object Pascal compiler.

> When the economic prospects for you look bleak

This is the richest nation on earth with a roughly 4% unemployment rate we’re talking about here.

“Tonight's story on the Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This, as you may recognize, is a map of the United States and there's a little town there called Peaksville. On a given morning not too long ago the rest of the world disappeared and Peaksville was left all alone. Its inhabitants were never sure whether the world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched, or whether the village had somehow been taken away. They were, on the other hand, sure of one thing. The cause. A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines, because they displeased him. And he moved an entire community back into the dark ages, just by using his mind.”

It’s A Good Life (The Twilight Zone, 1961)

Seems rather on the nose for 2025.

There’s probably no safe limit of driving a car or using a step ladder.

Alcohol has been with us since the beginning and will probably be with us until the end. The point of these studies should be to make people aware of the risks and motivate them to make appropriate choices.

But part of the understanding of risk should be that there is a floor below which something else will most assuredly kill you. Is that floor 10 drinks per week? 2? Who knows.

> the only way to do it is outright fraud and lying on the import forms.

It seems like the incentive to do this has just gone up immensely.

There are also more creative ways to get around country of origin labeling, as I understand it. For example, do 90% of the work in the high-tariff country and the final 10% in the low-tariff country which becomes the point of origin.

A question asked in such bad faith that it deserves explicit acknowledgment.

And here is the answer: many of these countries lack the resources to start and sustain programs such as the ones mentioned in the article. The resources needed include money, supply chains and expertise.

The U.S. provides a conduit for all 3 of those needed resources: stable funding, stable supply chains for food, medicine and manufactured goods and expertise though local training and partnership with U.S. and global experts for setting up, running and reporting on the programs.

The US also provided a way to deliver programs that was more resistant to corruption than many local efforts. Note that I did not say “free from corruption” because that is probably impossible, but much better than the alternative.

There is a trivial defeat for nearly all grocery store sales tactics: make a shopping list.

Engaging with certain salespeople is an altogether different proposition. In order to buy a car, you are forced to interact with multiple odious people who have ripping you off as their sole objective. Thats what I think of when I think of a “salesperson”. See also mattress stores, wireless carrier “retention” departments, HVAC installers, etc.

> I'd love to have some idea of what they could actually have that he'd be ashamed of, but he's so shameless it's hard for me to imagine.

“Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” -Eric Trump, 2014

"In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets" -Don Jr, 2008

> when it shut down Bernie

Bernie lost the popular vote in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries.

Education sits upstream of nearly everything, imo

> We need more cooperation for collective benefit instead of cooperation for the sake of profit

And you think that will happen with China and Russia as allies? Jesus. This thread is brigaded to hell by trolls.

It pays a fair bit in direct costs, it gets multiples back in return by being at the center of many systems.

To avoid getting flagged, you have to encode DOGE submissions as 1) flavor-of-the-month JavaScript framework 2) breathless AI boosterism or 3) CEO / founder hagiography

> at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections

The two Florida congressional districts holding a special election in April are Trump +34 and Trump +37 from the last election. So yeah, that’s not happening.

In 2018 the Democrats retook the house, which threw a spanner in the works of the second half of Trump’s first term. I’m guessing that’s about as much as we can hope for in the current term.

I hate to break it to you, but 2 million people engaged in an endless list of activities that encompasses repairing tanks, making grants, building bridges, supporting citizens abroad, distributing pension checks, performing surgery, making sure airplanes don’t crash and conserving forests is not the same kind of thing as a codebase and requires a different skill set to effect change in.

There is a middle ground where you’re not at risk of missing next month’s mortgage payment, but downshifting or changing careers might mean you take a lot longer to reach retirement (or “financial independence” if you don’t like the word retirement).

By slack do you mean high margin or high revenue per employee or something similar? Or a large war chest/lots of runway?

Citizens have the right to vote, not to be a Costco member.

Costco is not the sole source for anything. You can live a happy and fulfilled life never having set foot in a Costco warehouse. I often think of that just before I do, in fact.

> Compare your impression of Walmart shoppers to Costco shoppers.

There is literally no difference where I live.

I would think that the ways that people generate consistent alpha would include scale advantages, information asymmetry, execution advantages, geographical advantages and a strategic edge. Usually some combination of those factors.

Someone like Warren Buffet has a once in a generation skill combined with massive scale and information advantage (he sees deals in publicly-traded stocks before anyone else). You may claim that it’s not fair to cite Buffet here, but he’s just the most public example of market actors with a durable advantage.

Any large issuer of gift cards has an income stream from gift card breakage to the tune of a few percentage points of their outstanding gift card obligations each year.

Imagine a business where people give you cash and don’t ask for 5% or so of it back. Meanwhile your use of that cash is regulated with a feather (compared to a bank or other deposit-taker) and you can earn some yield while you wait for people to ask for their money back.

Gift cards are very lucrative at scale.

“It’s impossible for me to beat the market consistently” does not imply “nobody can beat the market consistently” or “nobody can beat the market consistently for a long enough time to become filthy rich”.

> We can be smug about our pure HTML5 static sites now but who knows what the browser landscape will be like in 2050.

Pure HTML probably has the best chance of surviving.

You can also buy a rubber or silicone finger tip such as this: https://a.co/d/iy5zNDe

> There are much better introductions than this as well

Do you have any recommendations?

This is a very approachable introduction to Perceptrons and Multi-Layer Perceptrons with some minimal-dependency code used to illustrate the main ideas.

That’s one of the saddest bits of AI enshittification yet.