clock_tower

The fox is in the henhouse, but he brought along a hammer and some nails and he really really doesn't like coyotes, so it's all good.

Part of the article was a bit confusing, though: "According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling 'Funding Choices.' The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then 'white list' particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher."

Third-party sites that block all advertising? I think the author has this confused with third-party ad blockers. And the part where Google does the tracking means that now is certainly the time to switch to Firefox and keep ajax.googleapis.com, google-syndication.com, google-analytics.com, and all the rest of them firmly on the banned list.

At times I almost feel nostalgic for the bad old days of Internet Explorer 6... (But then I remember what IE6 was actually like, and the feeling passes.)

It certainly does when it's posted in the context of a romantic relationship!

Happiness is dependent on other people holding up their side of the bargain? You have to have luck as well as effort, in order to be happy?

A grim thought.

The worst that can happen to General Atomics is that they don't get any new contracts after they're done building 3 (3!) fleet carriers. But building 3 carriers will give them enough expertise that they'll be able to bid on future shipbuilding contracts, and will probably land a few -- the Pentagon doesn't like letting contractors go out of business, and they'll recognize that General Atomics' giant Ford is at least half their own fault. It wasn't General Atomics that put out a contract for a fleet carrier that used every innovation at once...

Besides, I'm sure General Atomics had the sense to build factories in rustbucket towns and subcontract out to at least 26 states, preferably about half red and half blue; once your procurement system turns into a big enough jobs program, no one will dare to touch it.

Welcome to the cozy, comfortable world of defense contracting, dedicated to equipping the US to fight another world war, but only if the enemy is at least as cronyist as we are. The good news is that our only likely enemies for a world war actually are as cronyist as we are, or significantly worse -- but if any new Prussia ever rises in the world, we are _so_ dead.

SeaMonkey's pretty good -- it's Firefox oriented towards developers. I almost feel like it's a bit faster than Firefox proper, even though I'd expect it to be slower from extra developer tools; regardless, it can run all the same plugins, and it's a good choice of browser for software-related jobs.

Firefox/SeaMonkey, NoScript, uBlock Origin. It's pretty cozy over here.

"Don't Be Evil" was basic PR: figure out what you're most hated for, and loudly, repeatedly insist that you're the opposite of it. Delta promises comfort and ease in coach, which should only remind you of how hellish that experience can be; Google bragging that they weren't evil should've been an instant red flag.

> Historically speaking, I suspect there's a correlation between "virtue-focused" schooling and bodies of predominantly-upper-class students who are already nearly guaranteed to get an entry-level job in a prestigious field. The study is designed to help them compete inside a more-rarefied social circle.

Absolutely. The "liberal" in "liberal education" means "free from having to earn a living" -- education for the independently rich, the ruling class, to ensure that they can rule wisely, justly, and prudently. Those who don't have property yet have always been better off with a technical education -- a category which historically even included law and medicine.

I think it's a tolerably accurate definition; it's almost always more wise to cultivate enlightened self-interest instead of the unenlightened kind. Another generation of the current state of affairs, and the US will probably have another civil war -- and it'd be the height of folly to let things escalate to that point.

Also a lot of tact. If you just leave a check on somebody's desk, you're calling him a crook, and few crooks enjoy being called crooks; it works better to hire a politician for a speech somewhere, or offer him a seat on a board of directors or a well-paid job with a charity when he leaves office, or put in a word on his children's behalf with the director of an exclusive private school, or something like that...

The Saudis make an absolute art form of this, acting as a patron to the whole of DC. There are some memorable books about this.

There's an old folk belief in the Anglosphere, that the rich are less corruptible than the poor. (In 16th-century England, the legal definition of "an honest man" was one who had an income from land and investments of ten pounds or more: maybe equivalent to $100,000-$400,000 today.) This belief isn't true, at least not most of the time; but the art of deniable bribery gives a hint of where it came from.

But remember where democracy came from: the no-aristocracy, one-man-one-vote model of democracy is primarily a child of the French Revolution. (The US revolution created a cozy oligarchy, complete with property qualifications; democratization came later.)

Prior to that revolution, the only way to join the French aristocracy was to be the child of an aristocrat; no amount of amassed wealth could make you noble, and the French aristocracy had even persuaded themselves that they were biologically superior to the commoners. (Hitler and Himmler really liked that notion; they even envisioned turning the SS into a new ruling aristocracy, not least for France.)

The French Revolution blew the lid off all this, and made it possible for earning wealth -- in one generation or several -- to be enough to rise in station. This was always possible in England, and this is probably why the UK has never had a French-style revolution: no "insurgent elites," no men and women frozen out of the circles of power despite being qualified to enter.

So democracy isn't a sham; or, at least, it wasn't originally one. There was a time when all of the factions you describe -- working stiffs, professional politicians, and the ultra-rich (especially rich Jews!) -- were more or less genuinely oppressed, and settled on democracy as a solution that gave all parties at least some of what they wanted.

(This assumes a traditional reading of the French Revolution, of course; I've seen a revisionist reading that it was the work of a small elite that never enjoyed popular support. But I'm skeptical of this; if popular sentiment was really anti-Revolutionary, why did France have so many more republics?)

"Voluntary" is an old-fashioned term of art; it means "you volunteer your version of events to the information to the IRS" rather than "the IRS sends you what they know".

It's packed like an MRE! (Only less ready to eat, and probably much more appetizing.) This is the first I've heard of Blue Apron, but I'm really seeing where the accusations of excessive waste come from.

You were in excellent company, then! I've read other anthropological books from the period that took Castaneda more or less at face value...

Buck's translation is garbled, from what I've heard, but there's a thoroughly readable scholarly translation that came out relatively recently. I think it's by the same author who did the two-volume _Romance of the Three Kingdoms_ -- it certainly has the same cover style, and is hard to miss on Amazon.

Yes. But did he know that?

This is the Renaissance we're talking about; I wouldn't be at all surprised if he just picked the experiment he wanted and laughed off the rest, applying Petrarch's style of rhetoric in the sciences.

I also like the part where:

1. Fundamentalist Islam is a "delusional superstition".

2. "Modern insurgent groups" -- the most famous of which all follow the said "delusional superstition" -- are the good guys.

3. Even though fundamentalist Islam is a "delusional superstition," "Islamophobic conspiracy theorists" are still "whacked out".

And Doctorow probably sees himself as religiously tolerant, despite all this. This is why you want to check on your beliefs from time to time, to make sure they're not contradictory.

(And I forgot to mention the part where Saudi Arabia's wealth comes from technology; Doctorow's using "technology" to mean Internet technology, high-bandwidth transmission, and the like, not oil wells and internal-combustion engines.)

I see I shouldn't have let the article's reference to stones stand; the specific experimental apparatus used by both sides was lead balls -- Galileo rolled them down inclined planes, while his opponents dropped them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The article lost me when the author blithely claimed that it was Galileo who dropped two <droppable-item>s from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The author clearly has no idea what happens when you do that; while Galileo was far too good at choosing the experimental setup that would give him the answer he wanted, while ignoring any such setup that would prove him wrong, to make such an obvious mistake.

That's something else!

And yet I'm not surprised; all sorts of things turn out to have valuable niche uses despite being superseded in the mainstream. Now I'm wondering if the future might hold robot-driven sailing ships (wind and solar are renewable, and ocean shipping isn't exactly about speed) -- and I'm certainly not betting on internal-combustion engines going away for good.

This wouldn't surprise me, although manufacturing lithium batteries is still a bit complex. The railroads already use all-electric drivetrains; short-range locomotives carry batteries only, while long-haul ones use diesel to generate electricity and power the drivetrain. The big advantage of an electric drivetrain is regenerative braking, which is just as useful in cars (think of the Prius and its remarkable mileage) as in trains.

Over the medium term, I'd expect to see a car market that looks a bit like the train market: all-electric cars for city driving, plus hybrids for traveling in the country or in underdeveloped areas. Fossil fuels will probably never go away entirely (certainly the military will always need them), but oil is good for things other than fuel; 100 years from now, I expect electric cars will be the usual option while gasoline-burning hybrids are an expensive curiosity.

(Or we might move to a mix of electricity and hydrogen fuel cells; Toyota's betting on this, since natural-gas refining releases waste hydrogen. Safe containment of hydrogen is harder than safe containment of gasoline, though...)

"But then Galileo made the troubling discovery that the heavier stone does not fall any faster than the lighter one."

It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance.

Aristotle's physics were based on pretty accurate observation of the pre-industrial world, although they're surprisingly short on first principles. The really serious shortcomings were mostly related to impetus, the Aristotelian theory of motion -- it accidentally models friction well for objects in continuous contact with the ground, but it's very hard for Aristotelian physics to explain why an arrow keeps flying after it leaves the bowstring, and even gains speed after its apogee.

I wish you hadn't been downvoted; I upvoted you, for what it's worth. Thanks for your response!

I've always been skeptical of self-driving cars since they seem to be designed for Southern California conditions: clear weather and smooth, well-surfaced, well-marked roads. If Yandex starts out facing less optimized conditions, their self-driving efforts might produce something much more robust, safer, and more useful...

But the whole point of this project is to appeal to the mass market, and give smartphones a ten-year life cycle. They're explicitly aiming at a much wider userbase than hackers alone.

Better yet, it involves trapping them in summoning circles.

(https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/meet-the-artist-usin...)

The Middle Ages most certainly had rights and liberties, but they were given or withheld based on the kind of person you were: a slave had almost no rights, a serf only a few (serfs and slaves both existed in this period); a nobleman, especially a peer of the realm, had almost all the rights; and everyone in the middle had an unpredictable grab-bag of them.

A commoner couldn't sue a knight; a knight couldn't invest in a business; only Jews could loan money, but they couldn't use the proceeds to buy land. Two people could commit the same crime under the same circumstances and get completely different punishments, because one of them was a citizen of the city where the crime occurred and the other wasn't.

The Enlightenment's key innovation was to give everyone the same rights -- rejecting some rights (like immunity from lawsuit) as intrinsically unjust, and granting the rest to everyone.

It sounds like you're saying that the Nuremberg trials amounted to lynching; this isn't true. Western jurisprudence has always recognized rights and obligations that arise from the natural law, and take precedence over any written law. This was the case even in Roman times -- think of the unwritten "jus gentium" in the international context.

(China, by the way, also had the same understanding -- although the state was stronger in China, and so was more often able to defy the natural law and get away with it. Look at the long history of Chinese censors, who risked torture and death to remind the emperors of their duties.)

And as for "laws that are so obvious they need not be stated anywhere," what's common law if not that?

It surprises me that "Hitler was wrong" is hyperbole now.

The Islamic conquests are the same situation as the American conquests: numbers make it impossible to give the land back to the surviving descendants of the conquered, but they shouldn't be treated as second-class citizens of their own countries. The conquerors' descendants should stop celebrating the conquest; they should acknowledge that what their ancestors did was profoundly wrong; and they should give the conquered peoples more privileges and social prestige than the conquerors, not less.

Thanks for your answer, to begin with!

But looking at the American Indians' situation, I'm not entirely convinced. The descendants of the expropriated Indians are strangers in their own country just like their ancestors were -- the effects of a land grab or whatever don't end with the deaths of the perpetrators and victims. If handing the land back isn't possible (too many whites, blacks, and others for everyone to emigrate, and not nearly enough Indians to inhabit the country afterwards), then giving the dispossessed tax exemptions and other privileges is certainly a good idea.

As far as Serbia, I was going to disagree with the particulars of your example until I realized that you meant the Kosovo War, not the Yugoslav Wars. That's a related but at least equally thorny question, I think: is there a point at which facts on the ground can override historic rights? My instinct is to say no: if the Serbs can't grab the parts of Bosnia inhabited by Serbs, the Albanians can't grab the parts of Serbia inhabited by Albanians. I think that should be uncontroversial in this context, but it gets more troublesome when you try applying it further back in history...

So, I guess the smartest thing you can do when conquering a region is to allow and encourage the conquered people to join the conquerer's society, and to treat them as first-class citizens when brought on board. That worked for the Roman Empire -- and it's honestly not a bad way to treat conquered peoples.

So, if Hitler had successfully made the Volga into Germany's Mississippi, and then 200 years passed, it would be unjust to demand that the Third Reich give the land back to its former inhabitants? (Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, etc.)