complex_exp

And to some quite extreme people any kind of government that is not solely based on religious wisdom expressed via the clergy is an affront to God (to Allah) - an extremely serious crime worthy of uprisings and martyrdom. Doesn't matter if it's a monarchy, a democracy, or a Soviet/Chinese style one-party system. Unless that party was exclusively filled with religious scholars.

(there's an alternative line of thought that says "you gotta follow the leader because a leaderless state is even worse", and that line of thought is generally prevailing in muslim countries; that's how one would justify having some out of the blue family running Saudi Arabia, with its two out of three most important Muslim holy places)

It would be very strange if they didn't try things like these. It's actually a pretty competent government that knows how to look for itself, the very fact that Salafism hasn't yet destroyed them (the Saudi Family) is a massive achievement of its own, not to mention the quite effective OPEC+ cartel.

That being said this will be decided by whichever technology is cheaper (including things like the risk premia of being potentially cut off from supplies), regardless of agitation either way. Unless somehow, magically, we can force everyone to pay up for their share of damage caused by temperature change - which is extremely far away from being realizable. UN Security Council cannot agree on much more obvious things, like deciding in specific cases that bombing civilians is actually illegal.

Not sure if everyone knows just how easy making something like this is. This kind of an app takes less than one week to develop, using the OpenAI function calling API.

How do solar flares burn satellites? I thought they just mess up the ionosphere and inhibit communication.

You can just patch the call then, right? I.e. turn it into NOPs

You're right, but I don't see how we could not have those things with the copyright laws as they stand and people being what they are. Maybe it could be a little bit better, but not substantially better.

YouTube wasn't killed and thrived as a platform throughout the process. Meanwhile YT ads funded the lawsuits and negotiations, with a surplus. It is pretty much a solved problem now. This is as peaceful as it gets when you genuinely infringe on someone's very valuable rights.

Your comment is very valid. I'd just add that AI tools are clearly taking the "YouTube approach": they provide a large value added, ignore copyright for the moment, and hope to resolve it peacefully at some later point in time. This worked very well for YouTube.

Much less impressive, though still useful: ChatGPT is an awesome movie subtitle translator. Only very unusual phrases need to be corrected, often there are no such cases. There are projects on GitHub that automate the translation. Short SRT files can be just pasted into the chat with appropriate instructions.

I've always had a problem with admission rates, since they obviously depend on self-selection (and supply of schools).

Germany is a good example here, they have a wide spectrum of schools starting already past primary education (around 10 years old). Many of those schools, those of the "mid" and especially "lower" rank do not bash into children's heads that they absolutely must go to a good university or they will be a failure. As a result those kids do not apply there, instead they go into internships and get a job. Overall there is a continuum that a) reduces pressure on people that probably shouldn't study medicine or law, b) gives better education to talented children by putting them together in more aligned groups.

Crucially, the admission to those schools past age of 10 is not zip-code based. Admitting children by zip-code past the very first school where you learn how to sit, read, write and multiply numbers is nonsense.

A process like this will result in a higher university admission rate, all else being equal, including the "true difficulty" of getting into a specific university.

That may be it, under-supply of schools. What's required there besides perfect, or near perfect SAT scores?

Also, I've always wondered why so few Americans decide to study in Europe. I understand some might not be able to afford the remote study, but this doesn't explain everything. Language is not a problem, every top university offers all, or almost all master's level courses also in English.

> Ivy league students don't get there by themselves. A life-time of adults help you.

See, this is what I do not get. I got without excessive effort into a top university in Europe. I never had to be taken care nearly this much. Learned calculus at 14-15 by buying an old book in a used book store. Learned programming at around the same age by reading C++ tutorials and doing programming competitions (ACM style, but easier). Ran in various science competitions, here indeed teachers helped me by giving me books, exercises and guidance, with greater or smaller success. Most of my university peers had similar histories. I believe I would be admitted to an Ivy school if I were American, based on my professional experience with people that studied there.

What gives? Is it the last >=2 decades that changed the picture too much? Is it somehow an exclusively American problem? Where are the self-motivated kids, why aren't they taking most spots in those schools? Did something systematically kill the motivation?

The slight (or perhaps not so slight) neurosis and coping mechanisms like "I wasn't even trying, so I didn't fail" imply that those kids are way, way past their comfort zone. Being this far out is very unhealthy, can even be lethal.

It's hardly in ruin, has more cash on the balance sheet than, for example, all the help sent to Ukraine, military and humanitarian. It's just that making a shit ton of money ain't actually that fun because your job is basically to constantly patch holes in this gargantuan ship that never stops.

The first point is more important. The second point mostly helps with getting the first point done. When other things get stable you can adjust things at your job, or just quit and do something else entirely.

Someone in their 20s often believes bullshit stories about productivity, and understands very little about the social practice of allocation of resources and rewards (aka politics). This can be easily observed by hearing statements like "you know, there is politics at place X!". Gosh, well I hope so, otherwise it would mean there is nothing valuable at place X (i.e. nothing to allocate), or there is exactly one person there.

Oh no! Talk to me when the corporate structure kicks you out with zero day notice.

That very well may be true, but what's wrong with trying to cheat the system and do only the fun part? Clearly some people manage to do just that. I generally don't care about making the business fly, I care about what I care about.

A better discussion would be about what can you reasonably expect, for example you'll probably never lead a project which puts a limit on your salary. It may still be a good decision.

Looks about right for Google, but then which software company doesn't look like that?

It's cool.

I'm not confusing (the market cap and the book value), but rather simplifying things on purpose.

Not quite. Your deposits are usually redeemable on a short notice, while most of bank's assets are usually loans and mortgages and other long term debt.

> Banks work a bit differently, btw, they should also have more $ assets than liabilities, but there's generally no direct 1:1 link as described above.

The total difference between assets and liabilities is the common stock (equity). This also shows why it's a very bad thing when the stock of a bank goes to zero, it means some liability will not be covered and thus the bank can be considered bankrupt. I'm simplifying here.

From this point we can take a history tour to the 2008 meltdown, when we had this situation everywhere: bank A would short the common stock bank B because bank A had a lot of assets in bank B (which show up in bank B as liabilities). Bank B did the same thing to bank A for the same reasons. This is not as stupid as it sounds, because banks are not the only players in capital markets, using those shorts they essentially spread the default risk all over the equity markets. While this whole clusterfuck of nobody-trusts-nobody is going on the SEC comes out all of a sudden and bans the short sale of bank stocks, because shorting is evil or something. Imagine how much that made things worse after the only way to hedge entire banks going under was suddenly removed.

Russia. All the asian russians are very much treated as second class citizens, from the top (deciding where to draft mobiks from) to the bottom (a much worse case of what americans today would call police brutality / bias). We have to see if it survives though.

He never worked in Apple, no?

Uh, no, private property is subjogated to national interest. Personal freedom is subjogated to national interest (you may be conscripted). In all countries. The only way for things not to fall into a terrible state of affairs (like in Russia or Iran) is for the civil society to perform political acts, like engage in honest journalism, activism and critical thinking. And even then freedom and security are not guaranteed.

Thinking that you can be a free-from-all libertarian is like being a house cat that does not comprehend the system that keeps him alive. It is only because the system works that you can enjoy personal freedoms.

Russians have fully outsourced their both internal politics (resulting in for example the absolutely atrocious state of the courts of law) and foreign politics (mobilization! yay, go die in a trench!) to the tzar and look how that turned out. They also paid taxes and generally speaking accepted the offered social contract, but didn't monitor the situation and react to transgressions.