anovikov

...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.

Oh well several arcminutes is excellent. Yes this is best case.

building a WCS model (pixel XY <-> ray vectors) of a camera is a solved science. Of course you can never expect it to be rectangular.

That's basics of meteor observation. As long as camera didn't move, you can plot the track against the stars and time is known. Then with two tracks from different locations, orbit is determined.

This is absolutely trivial as long as any fixed ground objects are visible in a camera and does not at all require some sub-pixel precision.

20 years back, i've build a tennis prediction system that beat bookies hands down while placing bets on around 30% of all games - and actually made a modest profit (simulated, i never tried because it makes no sense) if i bet on every single game in both ATP and WTA. And then i ran out of drops and profit per drop before account was banned, dropped to ~$100 or so.

These days i heard, no one even tries. Not that it's impossible to make a profit - it's just that automated betting on a fresh line is impossible to conceal anymore and you are banned after 1-2 bets.

Either this, or will instead become a China-like full-on fascist. Because capitalism stops working if there are no guarantees of private property (no point to own stock if company can be nationalised, diluted, or simply gifted to a crony at whim), and every dictatorship eventually slides to that territory. US is no exception. It will not remain a hybrid for a long time - it will go either way.

The catch here is that homeownership rate is the highest in history now except 2000s speculative subprime bubble when a lot of purely investment properties were bought at 103% mortgage by people who could not afford the risk.

I only meant to say that China will simply revert to government ownership of virtually everything, eventually, when they will no longer need to maintain the mask of capitalism. Government already owns 60% of productive capital there.

I didn't mean to say that China is set for failure as a nation. Merely that it will eventually become again fully "socialist"/"communist" rather than remain a hybrid system it currently is.

Well, everything in non-democratic countries, except (part of) organised crime, exist with the approval and in service of the state. So formal ownership doesn't matter there (this is why Chinese stock market is a joke).

I don't think anyone assumed it to be any different. This is the case in every non-democratic country and this is exactly why capitalism is inseparable with democracy (because there won't be capital when there is no system that ensures that it won't be arbitrarily taken from you, with you thrown into "re-education" camp). Similarly, socialism is inseparable with authoritarianism because give people real voting rights and they will vote socialism out. Hybrid regimes that have been attempted, quickly flipped onto one or the other side - democratic capitalism, or authoritarian socialism - because they are unsustainable and can only be maintained for some time with careful management.

For vast majority, it never worked. I know plenty of people who made it there and there were just two categories:

- Freelance platforms. Hard-mode multiaccounting (passport scans, rented RDP servers, auto clicking apps, drop cards, etc), hard squeeze tactics.

- One-time luck that ran after at one point, to never return.

"Networking" may work if you are a Stanford graduate hanging out in go-to places in the Valley, but not if you are a European, much less if you are an Indian. I never met a single person who could probably be my client. Most are too poor, the remaining ones are too smart.

Someone will soon discover the killer app for FPV drones...

Haven't tried Chinese foie gras, but Chinese caviar is excellent and i see no point buying Russian one anymore, much less Iranian (Iranian is too pricey for me anyway).

This problem just doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Ambulance is just another truck. There are some fees involved with having priority on the road and some regulations, but it's just another truck. It won't cost (to anyone - i mean OF COURSE it is free for the actual patient) over a hundred euros or so to do a simple across-city ambulance ride anywhere in EU, maybe 2x the price of a cab.

That's corruption and nothing more. End it and imprison everyone who ever had a tangential relationship to this system, for life - to ensure no one will try to pull this sort of "regulatory capture" again.

In every game, you can't repeat same trick on and on and expect same results. Eventually the trick gets old. It has nothing to do with AI - been that way since forever.

To become rich, a country needs rule of law, guarantees of private property, democracy and institutional stability brought forth by natural selection by centuries of stable, functional legal system. There are no hacks to that. Countries that lacked it, only became rich for a short time on a temporary hack then plunged (Japan) or will inevitably plunge back (Saudi Arabia), when trick stopped working.

This will be especially true in the era of falling birthrates. Because it adds an additional factor: ability to attract quality people. In the age of AI, quality people are well, those with deployable capital. They want to live in a country where their capital won't be confiscated and they won't be imprisoned at will.

OK count it as race too: "Reds"

SpaceX enjoys an effective monopoly in at least one critical sector. And it seems to be entrenching this monopoly. This is where the company value is. AI in space is bs but it doesn't matter.

Why are Russians supposed to integrate? They are not Jews (if you mean Russian spouses of Jews). They are there so that their Jewish spouses are there, too. They don't "multiply" in the sense that their Israeli-born kids do not grow up Russians, so it's not like Israel is risking being "liberated" by some Putin successor someday, their culture dies with themselves.

With Israel, it's because of race of course, and also poorly integrated new repatriants who almost never knew Hebrew before repatriation.

As for Poland, i am extremely surprised too.

It's extremely counterintuitive to see France score very low (so very good) in this rating for literacy, while Poland, very high. Why is that?

Interestingly, in Spain where investments are one of the lowest as per table, trains are fast and arrive on time. Spain by all accounts has the best high-speed train service in the world (one problem is mountains in the north where speeds are much lower...). Why? Maybe difference is that German railways are mostly intended for freight?

Why not? People thought so about Soviet Union too. Just keep pressing until it dissolves, then reform away what's left until shards of the former empire is inhabited by people identifying as something else and no one speaks Russian at home, and sees Russia as a former occupying power.

Why so? Ukraine at this time is enjoying a certainty: Russians are already doing whatever they can to harm them and no surprises are possible. If "peace" will be established they will have to be ready for a surprise attack in an unknown way - because forces will not be committed like they are now - at any moment, and because it will be "peacetime", they will be in a much poorer position to be prepared. "Peace" makes Ukraine a lot more unsafe and in general worse off than just continuing the war - on a permanent basis if need be. Infrastructure will eventually adapt. People already did.

And of course, it makes the rest of the world MUCH better off because Russia can't be much of a trouble anywhere else. It already let Syria and Armenia shake them off because they had no resources to spare.

This is a big mistake. Ukraine will be safe only when Russia is completely undone - there is no point to "end the war" with anything that could be called "Russia" still standing in any recognisable way.

But really, it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run. Two-engine planes won. 777 burns 30% less fuel per passenger and has almost the same cabin width. And top level became a flop because it's too narrow for a first class cabin by today's standards and all other uses for them make no sense. Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition in which C-5 Galaxy won: it was meant to be a cargo plane with a small - top floor - passenger cabin.

Given extreme political bias here, it's easy to predict the reaction lol

(1) - what's horrible? renting out flats is a business. not paying the bills shouldn't be tolerated, ideally shouldn't be technically possible.

(2) is negated very simply - have both old door key AND digital security key which auto closes if there are unpaid bills for say more than 5 business days.

Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.

I wonder what's even wrong about it. This is how funds normally operate: motivation for investors is upside, motivation for coders is to be able to code and get paid for it, motivation for people who run this circus, is fees.

And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token.

Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products.

No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.

Truth be told, these days one can't really hope to succeed in life doing any jobs that involve delivering stuff that goes through the screen. Time to move on.