apsophus

> Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change.

I'm mystified by this. Why does maintenance have to be a 'conservative' thing? Probably 70% of software engineering work is maintenance of one kind of or another. Are those engineers conservatives? Do they 'resist change'? Unless you mean 'conversative' in a very restricted sense of that word.

> so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.

This is a version of 'technological determinism' (Google it if you need to). If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.

Except that the whole point of Hobbes's sovereign is that there can be only one, because in his system divided sovereignty leads to anarchy. So any other entity that looks capable of sharing aspects of sovereignty with government is anathema to Hobbes - even if that entity also 'keeps the peace.'

You'll be fine.

Yes, it's true that if you happen to have expertise in ML or a related field then your career prospects right now are looking good. But not having ML absolutely doesn't mean that your career prospects are bad. To use medicine as a parallel: sure, it might be sexy and lucrative to be a Brain Surgeon (or whatever), but 1) only a tiny percentage of doctors can be brain surgeons, and 2) being a doctor is a solid and well-paid career no matter what you specialize in.

As for the people who say ML is going to make most software developers obsolete because machines are going to learn to write code - don't believe the hype. A large chunk of the work programmers do is translating vague specifications from other humans into precise technical concepts (and only then into code). The only kind of machine thay could really do that kind of work well would be a general AI, and that is 1) not even on the horizon in terms of our current technical knowledge, and 2) basically a social and cultural singularity for humanity as a whole, so that worrying about your own career prospects I those circumstances would honestly be kind of silly.

Many things, from the Liberal government's new taxes on landed wealth in the 1910s, to the advent of democratic socialism and universal healthcare after the Labour party's victory in the 1945 election, to the 'Long Boom' of economic growth that the whole capitalist world experienced from the end of WW2 up to the 1970s.

Data like these are interesting, but you still need the deep historical context to make sense of what it all means. Of course, for the overall big picture, you couldn't do better than Thomas Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_.

What if the mass is distributed in a ring surrounding the gyro at a distance? How would you distinguish between spinning versus mass in that case?

General Relativity may seem counterintuitive, but experimentally it really does seem to be the way our universe works. Starting out from the position that absolute motion is meaningless has proven remarkably fruitful. It's also something a lot of very smart people have been thinking about for a hundred years. Whether or not you find Mach's arguments plausible, they're fundamental philosphical claims and can't simply be dismissed through a half-baked thought experiment.