e3xu

I think a lot of it is a kind of learned desensitization. The constant bombardment of advertising from a young age, and 24-hour news cycles conditions a natural response of cynicism and numbness to certain kinds of alarming messages. Our brains are already saturated with the kind of "buy this and you'll be happy" and "the world is scary and falling apart" messages that we develop categorical methods of dealing with all messages of that form. It is a painful act to care about something and be let down later, and it is painful to care about things that you feel like you can't do anything about. Add in a generally accepted (if thinly veiled) terrorism narrative and a socially acceptable practice of "let's not talk about politics" and you get the kind of response you've been getting.

So this may just be a question of taste, but I don't feel that 1Q84 is the most accessible of Murakami's novels. Norwegian Wood is probably a more typical entry point, or else Kafka On the Shore, or his latest book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

In practice, the Chinese language typically represents concepts in 2 or 4 ideograph segments. Not every possible combination is in regular usage, but the number of potential linguistic "words" is closer in order of magnitude to the 10000 choose 2 binomial coefficient, i.e. 49995000.

Agreed. And I wonder what the Pale King would have looked like if he had gotten the chance to defend it from cuts.

I agree with you for the most part, but I want to comment on the last phrase you use: "If they are bad laws, then we can work to change them. No amount of VC funding should make you immune to their reach." I need to direct you to what happened to Aereo, whose business was destroyed by a Supreme Court ruling [0]. The legal system is one area where innovation is slow, and progress is reliant on inefficient mechanics like politics, bureaucracy, precedent, prosecutorial discretion, judicial opinion, and others. This is by design. Compare for a moment a courtroom of the 1950s and 2014, versus a computer of the 1950s and 2014. Our ability to update our regulatory mechanisms has not kept pace with our ability to create new ideas that need regulation.

My biggest gripe is perhaps not even the inefficiency of the system, but its natural tendency towards systematic support of entrenched players, see the kind of regulatory capture performed by Comcast, or the article about the Chase Whistleblower from a few weeks back. You say that no amount of VC money should make an individual institution immune to the law, but this sort of immunity is conferred all the time by anyone with deep enough pockets, through mechanisms like lobbyists, regulatory capture and the various campaign finance loopholes exploited by Super-PACs. See any of Lawrence Lessig's writings of the past few years for more discussion. I'm reminded of an article that showed up on Hacker News about the downsides of an economy with a lot of entrenched players (permit me to suggest the "cartel" nomenclature) taking advantage of their favorable position in overly-bureaucratic systems: http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-econom...

I do agree that Uber's shady business practices are not laudable, and there are certain important regulatory functions that can only be performed by unbiased parties interested in the public good, of which the legal system/government ought to be the exemplary case. But I think your suggestion that we can simply work to change bad laws is perhaps dependent on a system that currently cannot consistently keep up with the pace of change, not just because of inefficiency but because of perverse incentives (here is where I could begin to talk about the influence of corporate money in politics). I suspect we will have to wait at least another half-generation before a critical mass of individuals with both a true understanding of the exponential pace of progress and well-credentialed clout can begin to make serious reforms and updates in that area.

Until then, "move fast and break things" may, terrifyingly, be our best option.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7943976