derriz

What economic "just so" stories have I presented? You accept that economic capacity is not infinite, right? Then you need to tell me from which sector would you reallocate workers to doing the things you listed: producing cheap plastic toys, low-value clothing, inexpensive electronics, TVs, computer assembly, low-value semi-conductors and CPU production.

Could you be more specific about the knock on effects of not making cheap plastic toys, etc. domestically? The US is still the clear global leader in technical innovation in nearly all sectors (and I'm not an American).

Countries don’t have infinite supplies of labor and capital. The more of an economy dedicated to making cheap plastic toys or stitching tshirts, the less economic resources available for inventing the next iPhone. The very reason China is becoming more competitive in higher value-added economic activities is because China itself has moved away from low value economic activities - like manufacturing cheap clothing - these activities that have largely moved to poorer neighboring countries over the last decade or so.

And if you’re worried that the US is about to be out competed by China in the IP sphere, surely the US would be in a much weaker position if say 50% of its economy was focused on the production of cheap generic goods?

We have all the technological tools available to largely decarbonize energy. We don’t have to wait for, nor have the time, to wait around for a deus-ex-machina.

Given the dominance of state level actors in fossil fuel extraction (a role they did not have in horse based transport), to deny states have a role in decarbonizing energy seems naive. I don’t see what’s unreasonable to suggest that the current massive resources states put into supporting fossil fuel consumption and spending on wars to protect its production and distribution be redirected towards accelerating the adoption of modern clean energy production and use.

Why? The vast majority of fossil fuel production globally is through state-owned companies.

By "through metadata", you mean with some external separate mechanism unrelated to the XML spec? That's exactly the flaw of what's supposed to be a universal and general document representation.

Both UTF-8 or UTF-16 are supported, yes, but that doesn't solve the problem because XML parsers have to deal with other encodings. A document that initially looks like UTF-8 could be almost any of literally hundreds of encodings including all the common ISO 8859 encodings. Which is why XML processing/parsing code has to go through multiple phases: a "try to determine the encoding" phase (using heuristics like those described in https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-guessing) and then switch to a "parsing" phase after rewinding to the start of the document.

I did some work for a bank once which were in the process of moving to using XML as the universal messaging format (message bus architecture) and this wasn't some theoretical issue - it was a genuine pain as the message sources and sinks included a bunch of machines with different native encodings including a bunch of IBM machines (EBCDIC), old Windows machines, proprietary Unices like HPUX, along with Linux, etc.

This is a well known problem with XML.

I dislike it because it failed in such a fundamental way as a way to represent a document; you cannot, in general, reliably determine what characters the bytes in an XML file represent - the best a general XML processor can do is guess.

Yes. The power in wind is proportional to the cube of wind speed - which falls significantly as you get closer to the ground especially in a typical residential setting. Anything below 15m is going to struggle to deliver any kind of useful power.

And wind turbine power scales with the square of the blade length. Which is why turbine blade designs have completely displaced this sort of "wind catching surface" device which scales linearly at best in terms of materials. Solar PV scales linearly which is what makes small and domestic PV practical.

The advances in wind power over the last decade or so have come from engineering bigger and bigger blades.

I don't see domestic wind power ever being practical at all but especially given the competition of solar PV even far from the equator.

I would have imagined that an influx of any type of money - not just foreign money - into a market with limited supply growth would push up prices.

Probably I am getting overly sensitive about what seems to be creeping casual xenophobia even in mainstream media. The way the story is presented, the sketchy “foreign” aspect of the money is apparently central to it having this undesirable outcome.

> You are arguing that he came to the "wrong" conclusions without actually arguing against those conclusions

I am not.

Benn claims that the papers say one thing when in fact, if you read them (even the abstracts), they mostly say the exact opposite. It's that simple.

How? He carefully examines and actually reads all the papers referenced in the video and shows that they either don’t support Benn’s claims or completely contradict them? Drawing conclusions about Benn Jordan on this basis is not ad hominem. Given the contents of these papers (i read a few of the abstracts), Jordan either didn’t read the papers, didn’t be understand them or else is being disingenuous.

I was a regular viewer of Benn Jordan until seeing one of his videos about how Apple sucked because the iPad was incompatible with so many MIDI and DAW controllers. He went through his devices one by one, plugging them into the iPad and then showing that the iPad didn't recognize the device.

I thought it was a joke of some kind and eventually he would give the "reveal" but no, he finished the video without ever considered that USB is a host/device connection - and although USB-C confusingly introduced a symmetric cable, you cannot connect two devices back-to-back (one end has to be a host) and expect anything useful to happen. And that's why Apple sells a "camera" kit to allow an iPad to act as the host to USB devices.

Seeing him use an oscilloscope to diagnose an Ethernet issue in an earlier video had given me the expectation that he was technically knowledgeable and interesting. So it was shocking that he could present conclusions with such a confident and knowledgeable air, having missed such a basic and fundamental fact about USB.

And there was no push back in the comments that I could see at the time - so seemingly half a million viewers would have finished the video feeling they had learnt something.

I don't see how you can make such a binary claim - UK vs "the rest of Europe". Your map shows 6 broad categories of legal systems in use across Europe. Even if you put the 5 non-common law systems into one bucket, it still wouldn't make the UK unique as Ireland operates under common law.

Have you a source? Using IMF data for GDP per capita PPP, the UK's growth has underperformed that of France, Spain and Italy over the last 10 years. In 2016 the UK's per-capita GDP in international dollars exceeded that of France by approx. $1600, estimates for 2026 are showing France being ahead by about $1000.

But why is having a pair of separate independent operations, fork and exec, required to achieve this? A single fexec call could be implemented to work in the way you describe, no?

Even if only 30% of the population are citizens (like in Kuwait)?

Here's my small pushing back story.

I was an independent contractor for a large bank. My contract kept getting rolled so I ended up there for a few years even if the original piece of work was an 8 month job. A new CIO was appointed during my stint and a huge new IT initiative was launched to replace the decades old core banking system with a "modern" off-the-shelf "bank in a box" product that Oracle had recently purchased. This product was new and had been "successfully" launched by a tiny 8 branch bank in Ghana. The bank I was working for had hundreds of branches in multiple western countries. The product did not fit in any way/shape or form the existing processes in the bank, it's technical infrastructure, the regulatory regime, its retail products nor employment law (employee time is expensive in western countries - so solutions involving throwing bodies at menial repetitive tasks are not viable).

I had been at the coal-face for nearly a month of day long meetings with the vendor to try to get a single niche savings product supported on their system and it was torture. I could see it was never going to work. I had no notions that my lowly opinions would have any sort of impact but I made my opinions clear to my immediate manager - especially over lunch and when we would occasionally go to a nearby bar to watch sports after work. I eventually convinced him of the folly of the entire enterprise.

At some stage, he then spoke up to his manager expressing reservations who then called me in for an aggressive grilling on why I thought the new strategy was bound to fail. I explained - but he seemed unhappy with me and I was sure my contract would not be rolled - not that cared at that stage, I was hating the work at this stage.

I later found out that I must have had some impact because this manager brought up some of the reservations and issues at the next C-level meeting. He was promptly told by the new CIO that either he was either going to be a team player and get fully behind the initiative or else he was out as there was no room for saboteurs and passive blockers.

He got in line. I left of my own volition anyway. Two years later, the project was cancelled, the CIO fired and an $80m lawsuit with Oracle was the result. No real "moral of the story" - just that at some point up the hierarchy "push back" will meet the "owner" of the initiative and the pushback will quickly die.

The only reason I learned to touch type was out of boredom and the fact that the only “game” for the TI99/4a system (it had an “extender” with floppy drive and ran some spreadsheet) that my dad brought home from work at weekends was a touch typing tutor. When I started CS, I was in the tiny minority in my class that could touch type. During an introductory lecture for the course, one of the tips was “learn to touch type”.

VAT is the simplest of all taxes for businesses to deal with. VAT taxes business profits in a simple and completely unavoidable way before companies have a chance to throw their best accountants, lawyers and consultants at the task of minimizing corporation tax.

VAT is based on flows of cash so is trivial to calculate and to collect. Wealth taxes require valuation and are just too easy to minimize and are expensive to calculate, and difficult to extract. (E.g. I own shares in a family member’s small business via a loan I provided. What’s that shareholding worth for the purposes of a wealth tax?)

VAT acts also as a sales tax as well as a tax on “added value” - business profits - so replacing two separate tax regimes with a single trivial-to-calculate, difficult-to-avoid (requiring two parties to conspire together), easy-to-collect (cash-flow based) tax.

Without getting into the politics of taxation, it’s the best designed tax there outs.

VAT is trivial for businesses to deal with. You add x% onto every invoice you issue. The VAT due to be paid to the government is a simple sum of the amounts distinctly shown on each invoice you issue minus the sum of the VAT amounts on invoices you’ve paid. Income/employment taxes, corporate tax, import taxes, etc are orders of magnitudes more complex, dynamic and subject to legal interpretation. I was a small business owner for a while years ago and did the VAT myself. But there was no way I would even attempt employment or corporation taxes - covered by endless legislation and changing every year - that was a job for the accountant.

Probably it's just down to a different understanding of the word "internalize".

I know how to _use_ bazel effectively to do my work. I'm comfortable with its well-designed surface but whenever I've tried to understand the inner machinery I've given up - especially when presented with a bunch of custom skylark rules code.

It's like an anti-git in some regards - the surface of git (the CLI) is an abomination in many ways but the the mechanics of the tool are so ingrained and the model is so clear and simple - I never feel uncomfortable.

I've a need to have some comprehension of the inner machinery or the underlying model of my tools.

How do you internalize it?

Our bazel system is full of custom skylark code so understanding the build means effectively reading a bunch of ad-hoc code written with varying degrees of competence and with confusing dependencies. I’m kinda ashamed I don’t have a deep understanding of a tool I use daily - but every time I try reading the documentation I quickly give up.

What acting have I been doing? Feels like a weasely way of accusing me of lying when I said I hated my experience of factory work. If you have had a different experience of factory work, let’s hear it. And preferably without the presumption - particularly the weird idea that being antisocial or asocial is the norm for human existence.

You know nothing of my friends.

Have you ever worked in a factory? I find the people most enthusiastic about manufacturing are the ones least likely to have stood at a station in a factory performing manufacturing "work" - the vast majority of which is mind-numbingly boring and repetitive yet with minimal opportunities for passing the time with idle social interaction or chit-chat. Of all the non-professional work I've done, it was easily the least enjoyable. Even if it paid a bit less and demanded more physically, unskilled construction work was enjoyable in comparison. Even kitchen portering provided more stimulation - at least there was plenty of social interaction. This romanticization of factory work is weird.

When people extol the virtues of manufacturing, I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing. This isn’t an American thing btw - I’ve had arguments with brits and others who argue passionately that the country has been destroyed by the relative decline in manufacturing but when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?” it provokes fairly confused responses like “no but other people would”….

https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...

There are just too many examples of political leaders who achieved beneficial results initially but as their reign extended into decades, things went sour. Putin, Mugabe, Erdogan, Ferdinand Marcos, Mubarak, Hugo Chavez, Castro and even the likes of Gaddafi are commonly viewed as having improved conditions for the citizens initially but eventually left a legacy of degraded legal systems, weak civil services, rotten institutions in general, weakened or non-existent independent media and busted economies. It just doesn't work in practice which why nearly all countries have switched to term-limits.

Term limits encourage the development of robust laws, systems and institutions which provide a far more stable basis for running a society than having power structures that rely on the brilliance of an individual or individuals. Without terms limits or the like (and there are countless examples not just in history but currently around the world), individuals in power are motivated mostly to preserve that power and have less incentive to work on improvements that will outlast them.

I had a look at the reference and the Wikipedia creates a misleading picture. The source states

> Ireland has very limited horticultural and grain production on account of its topography and climate, and it imports around 80 percent of its animal feed, food, and beverage needs.

Cattle are predominantly grass-fed in Ireland which is largely self-sufficient in grass/silage. Not to minimize the fragility of its economy wrt to food production - but the 80% I imagine is due to the reliance on other EU for fruits, vegetables and grain but these imports are almost exclusively for human consumption.

Why the reference to “modern Java” then? Writing adaptor classes is not “modern Java” nor does it involve using “a mix of interfaces and default methods implementations”.

I was responding to your original claim and I’m well aware of such facilities in both Kotlin and Scala - having used both extensively. I was genuinely curious if the latest Java was in the process of adding support for trait/typeclasses - so I don’t understand why you’d bother to reply with something that completely changes your original claim.

> Actually in modern Java you can simulate type classes approach with a mix of interfaces and default methods implementations.

Can you? The beauty of traits/type classes is that you can attach them to any type - in a world where 90% of the functionality of any piece of software is supplied by dependencies - external types which you cannot change - this is a vital feature.

The last new coal power plant to come on-line in the US was in 2013 at Sandy Creek - 13 years ago. The last new coal power station built in Australia - Bluewaters Power station was built in 2009 - 17 years ago. In Europe coal's share has dropped from over 40% of generation at its peak in 2007 - about 20 years ago - and has declined to about 9%. Coal's days are over - natural gas is cheaper and more flexible, while solar PV and wind are cheaper.

There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.