chargingmarmot

Well, yeah, but isn't the EU also responsible for all the trash cookie-consent notifications I get from every website now?

Overall, I'm happy they're actively involved. The hands-off attitude in the US is terrible.

The issue with the Sherman Act is that it is broad and sweeping and leaves discretion up to the government.

So the answer to your question is: monopolization is illegal according to the the Sherman Act, and the power to regulate markets is well within the (extremely broad) scope of existing laws (including the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Act).

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

I shouldn't have said "eliminate". I'll defer to:

https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

or

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

I don't really have a strong preference for IRV (over, say, approval or score voting), but it does seem to be widely accepted as an improvement over first-past-the-post and also an option that has a realistic chance of adoption (due to slotting into existing electoral schemes without giant overhauls).

If you look at the policies these parties are actually backing, they're all about democratic reform:

* campaign finance reform

* voting reform

* legislative transparency

"Civility" would be a consequence of structural reforms; not a good-intentions effort.

I don't disagree with you about the problems related to wealth distribution. (I just watched the documentary "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" about 2 days ago and so I'm feeling primed there.)

I do think you're being excessively cynical about electoral reform.

Ultimately, we live in a democracy, and voters have power. The parties putting forward these reforms are advocating for things like democracy vouchers:

https://democracypolicy.network/agenda/open-country/open-gov...

which is a very anti-oligarchic/anti-plutocratic measure.

Reforms like instant runoff voting make third parties more viable by eliminating spoiler effects. In our present system, if you run as (or vote for) (say) a socialist candidate, you end up helping the right-wing by preferentially stealing votes from the moderate left-wing candidate. In this scenario, it's not rational for you to participate in politics because you end up hurting your own interests. Electoral reform can eliminate the perverse incentives here. In this scenario you can imagine the socialist candidate would say, "Hi, I'm the socialist, I care about issue X; and make your option 2 the green party candidate because of issue Y; or your option 3 the democrat because of issue Z". There are incentives for politicians to act civilly (since transferable votes mean they no longer strictly compete) and to offer better options to voters.

See: "Electoral rules discourage problem-solving and reward conflict" in https://www.americanprogress.org/article/its-time-to-talk-ab...

Electoral reform is actually one of the biggest issues that the party seems to back. (For exactly the reason you mention.)

Today I learned: Electoral reforms are one of the goals for the Forward Party and the Common Sense party. If you're a voter in California, you can help them with this by changing the party affiliation on your voter registration to the Common Sense Party to help them get recognition (they need 72,000 members).

* https://home.forwardparty.com/volunteer_find_your_state

* https://www.cacommonsense.org/

I would really like to see some form of electoral reform passed that would reduce spoiler effects, make third party movements more viable, and change the incentives for politicians in elections (e.g. instant runoff voting as endorsed by https://fairvote.org/ or https://cfer.org/ ; or proportional representation ).

I'm disappointed that two bills for ranked-choice voting have passed the legislature in California only to be vetoed by the governor (Schwarzenegger in 2007, Newsom in 2019): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform_in_California

I hope eventually some of these reforms will get more widely adopted.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/its-time-to-talk-ab...

I think you're oversimplifying animal behavior. Some thoughts:

There's a famous study involving capuchin monkeys that shows they have a sense of fairness.

I think many animal species are more sensitive to the suffering of other animals than you're giving them credit for: think of the way mother cats or bears act when they hear their offspring crying. Or the way mother dogs discipline their puppies about nursing.

Think of how donkeys are used commercially to guard sheep and the social instincts of the donkey (again it's linked to maternal behavior).

I think many birds are intelligent enough to want to pursue and punish potential threats.

We don't generally apply the concept of nature vs. nurture to animal behaviors but we really should.

An August 2022 Gallup poll showed that US approval of labor unions was at its highest point since 1965 (71%, up from 48% in ~2010; comparable to levels of 70-75% in the 1940s-60s). [1]

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...

Cool. Did you buy the $10,000 feature that will let you summon your Tesla from across the country sometime in 2018?

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/autonomous-driving/time...

I agree with the sentiment about media sensationalism but I don't think "space junk" is an issue we should be so quick to dismiss.

Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up).

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

With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.

The bill is opposed by the Hindu American Foundation. They give their rationale for opposing the bill in:

https://www.hinduamerican.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/HAF...

They state:

"We share the admirable goals of protecting civil rights and eliminating all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including based on caste. As such, the question is not whether we deal with allegations of caste discrimination, but how. If and when caste discrimination allegations emerge, they should be adjudicated under the existing protected class of ancestry, just as the state of California did in California Department of Fair Employment Housing v. Cisco Systems, Inc."

They state in https://www.hinduamerican.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Cas...

"All of these measures can be traced back to allegations being made by a for-profit, activist entity called Equality Labs which stands to profit from its caste competency training services."

---

I'm inclined to agree with them that caste discrimination is probably already illegal on the basis of ancestry.

(Unfortunately laws themselves don't eliminate prejudice.)

My impression was that Anduril wanted to own the software for multi-(thing) coordination.

i.e. consume information from multiple sources (satellites, ground stations, planes, drones) and use it to coordinate the action of other drones/planes/etc.

There's a list of things they actually do now on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries (see "Lattice" in particular)

There was an announcement last week (and yesterday) about a "Replicator" initiative from the DoD (using large numbers of cheap drones) that seems largely aimed at countering China in the Taiwan Strait; I can imagine this is the sort of business they want to be involved with.

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/8/29/n...

""" With Replicator, we're beginning with all-domain, attritable autonomy, or ADA2, to help us overcome the PRC's advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine again last February, they had that advantage too. Yet we've seen in Ukraine what low-cost, attritable systems can do — not to mention other commercial technologies.

They can help a determined defender stop a larger aggressor from achieving its objectives, put fewer people in the line of fire, and be made, fielded, and upgraded at the speed warfighters need, without long maintenance tails.

At DoD, we've already been investing in attritable autonomous systems [...] and in multiple domains: self-piloting ships, uncrewed aircraft, and more.

Now is the time to scale, with systems that are harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat than those of potential competitors. """

- (2023-09-06) https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/3517213...

I was going to say, "hey, maybe nuclear winter can help too!" but it sounds like maybe that whole thing was overstated

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

This one is called a circumstantial ad hominem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Circumstantial

I'm not sure what you're arguing, but I don't think its true that the claim "we want to secede because of injustices against us" was retroactive.

see: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...

"The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union."

I think there's a tendency for discussions about the south's position in the civil war to end up with slavery poisoning the well.

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

The bill is opposed by the Hindu American Foundation. They give their rationale for opposing the bill in:

https://www.hinduamerican.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/HAF...

They claim:

"We share the admirable goals of protecting civil rights and eliminating all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including based on caste. As such, the question is not whether we deal with allegations of caste discrimination, but how. If and when caste discrimination allegations emerge, they should be adjudicated under the existing protected class of ancestry, just as the state of California did in California Department of Fair Employment Housing v. Cisco Systems, Inc."

In https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u0jxQY_cLti2XP3nEw0d9OBa... they state:

"There is only one legal case on the issue of caste-discrimination in the United States to date. It involves an allegation of caste-based discrimination in the US."

and give some facts related to that case.

( from https://www.hinduamerican.org/press-statements )

"So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts." - James Madison

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/federalist...

This reminds me of how historians trying to find out about the historical Jesus have come up with some (objective?) criteria about what to accept as true.

Examples:

* Multiple attestation. Do we have multiple independent sources telling us the same thing?

* Contextual credibility. Do people behave in a way that's plausible given their setting (the languages they spoke, what they knew at the time).

* Embarrassment. Is this detail actually inconvenient for the person relaying it (and not the sort of thing they'd make up)?

see "Criteria of authenticity" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus

Tyler Cowen gave a great TED talk on a related topic: "Be suspicious of simple stories" (2009)

https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_simpl...

(Because it's such a great story I still remember the talk a decade later.)

"""

So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen?

One story you might be like the story of the quest. "Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" And you tell your story.

Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories but then I heard Tyler Cowen and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and again, it may stick.

You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories.

"""

1. The first part here doesn't argue against my claim that "blockchain is only good for evading regulation", it argues that evading regulation is sometimes a good thing. That's fine, let's set that aside.

2. The second part argues about centralized entities changing ownership. I don't think the example of Twitter usernames is a good use-case for blockchain: there's nothing here that isn't already solved by public key crypto alone (which is how blockchain solves the problem anyway).

Maybe Twitter here is just an example and you want to talk about corporate control over payment services? I don't think this is a compelling argument. There's no shortage of payment services and even if one of them is bad you can always find another. Yeah: Stripe or your bank go out of business tomorrow, but switching to Apple Pay or a different bank is not a huge problem.

What I like about SICP is how it shows how several different moderately-advanced (for an undergraduate) programming concepts are all related by a basic model of computing that's defined in the book.

It builds from first principles (among other things):

* (the core) the lisp metacircular evaluator

* computer algebra

* logic programming [1]

* a register machine

* a compiler targeting that register machine

(lazy evaluation, streams vs. lists, concurrency, and more)

I can't think of any other book in the undergraduate canon with that kind of breadth.

Personally I didn't really see any of this for the first time in SICP: I think I'd already had the whole "programs are data" epiphany from learning Haskell and reading PL-related papers before I read SICP. Still, it's really fun to see so much collected in one place.

(I think the fun part of learning new programming languages is the concepts they teach you. e.g. in my opinion there's another fun "reasoning is a syntactic operation" moment you get from learning a language like Coq.)

It's been a while since I looked at it but I remember enjoying "Concepts, Techinques, and Models of Computer Programming (van Roy and Haridi)" for reasons similar to why I liked SICP. (It's a little less broad, but has the same subject of ~"here are a bunch of different models of computing and how they are all related by the same fundamentals").

(Also, poke around http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ and check out Guy Steele's Lambda the Ultimate papers if you haven't already.) https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5790/AIM-353.... https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6091/AIM-379....

[1] You know, like Prolog? - from that "AI will solve all problems" moment we had in the 80s.

This just reinforces my point. The germs that killed the native Americans grew up in an environment where humans were living in close proximity to a variety of animals (cows, chickens, rats) for thousands of years. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)

Please. We live on a planet that has been bombarded by space rocks for billions of years and that's home to all sorts of viruses and bacteria that have been evolving to kill us for as long as we've been around.

If Mars were covered in gray goo we would have noticed by now.

My belief is that blockchain-based solutions are typically inferior to centralized ones except when the goal is to evade regulation. (Crypto is good for dealing in contraband, dodging currency controls, and collecting ransomware; but it's always less efficient than centralized solutions with a trusted authority. And the only time you can't find a trusted authority is when you're trying to dodge regulation.)

In this instance, I don't see how this offers any advantage over the usual registrar-based DNS: at the end of the day I'm just using the ENS rootnode keyholders as my registrar, and I don't see how the blockchain is solving any problem that couldn't be more efficiently solved with a traditional database.

Sincere question: what paid search do you have in mind?

How conceptually could a paid search engine solve the problem of SEO and spam? (Curation seems economically infeasible?)

Is what you're actually proposing ad-free search results? (I'd be willing to pay Google approximately $0.01 per search for this. I suspect this is probably more than they get from anything but the most expensive ads (pharma ads that confused old people will click on).)

What I would really love is a browsing-assistance agent based on something like an LLM that can summarize and de-cruft search results for me and show me content extracted from web pages in a standard format without any Javascript. (I don't need an LLM to be the arbiter of truth, I just want it to be good at summarizing documents.)

(Because Google is so wedded to the ad ecosystem I'm not sure I trust them to be the steward of technology that is basically about removing ads from my life.)

There's a book I like called "Design Rules: The Power of Modularity"; it was written by some business professors in 2000 and is loosely about the industrial organization and the history of IBM's System/360 (the first "modular computer family") and more generally about how modularity enables innovation and growth.

They enumerate what they call "modular operators" which are basic ways a system can be changed:

* "splitting" a design into modules

* "substituting" one module design for another

* "augmenting" adding a new module to the system

* "excluding" a module from the system

* "inverting" to create new design rules

* "porting" a module to another system

It doesn't matter here whether the modules are functions, computer programs, hardware components, business units, 2 pizza teams, or companies in an industry (Intel, AMD, RAM manufacturers...).

Modularity is a core part of the Unix philosophy. Unix itself is an operating system and involves some particular concepts (pipes, files, processes).

It seems obvious that the concepts for an operating system (pipes, files) will be less relevant in a different domain (say, web programming).

While I agree that maybe the Unix abstractions aren't appropriate for new problems in different domains, I think some parts of the Unix philosophy (i.e. modularity, minimalism, and compositionality) still deserve consideration.

This makes sense to me based on the economics related to interest rates.

If interest rates go up, it becomes harder to borrow money to purchase a home. When it becomes harder to borrow money to purchase a home, demand for homes goes down and inventories go up. When inventories go up, prices go down. After prices go down enough (to what is equally affordable with the new interest rates), sales go up and inventories go down.

Last week there was a Washington Post story [1] about how home affordability was hurt by the higher rates, but it feels like that was just part of what should be an expected chain of causes and effects.

(Granted, none of this is happening in isolation, but my gut feeling is that interest rate changes are the most important factor to consider right now).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/12/millennia...

No. You're referring to the part of the article where it mentions Peter Thiel as a backer of an environmental non-profit started by a Dutch teenager, correct?

If environmental non-profit startups count as big tech, then what doesn't?

Maybe you're thinking of the part of the article where it mentions Amazon: "We could force modern logistics giants like UPS and Amazon to take the lead on reusability"? (Given the title it's ironic that the author is proposing that big tech be given more responsibility for waste solutions.)