esja

Worth noting Robert Morris's addendum: "Including Common Lisp".

It was Muhammad Ali, after the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974.

On his return he was asked what he thought of Africa and said “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”

You're right, and it's getting worse, but even in 1962 there were problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...

The internet accelerated the decline by 1) destroying media business models, leading to seasoned editors and fact checkers being replaced by cheaper twenty-something Twitter addicts, and 2) driving consumers into filter bubbles and feeding their confirmation bias.

Even NPR are deteriorating. For example, this aged extremely poorly: https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/13192811012239400...

Zurich

In my experience the women who make it to these levels are no less domineering than the men, and often more so.

Yes, that’s the big unknown. It’s hard for any sort of anti-establishment populist to emerge. Trump is an example of this: he basically ran against both parties, was rendered ineffective, and they haven’t stopped trying to bury him. Ross Perot, Ron Paul & Bernie Sanders covered similar ground (albeit from different angles) and hit the same wall.

You’re right, it’s not obvious. And perhaps to strengthen your point, countries with compulsory voting (e.g. Australia) don’t seem to show any particular skew.

Regarding the original point, Pew published some interesting stats on voter preferences:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v...

According to this, progressives are a very small slice of the population, and nowhere near a majority even if you include adjacent groups.

It didn't happen that way either: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/...

He initially referred to UV light as a disinfection agent, and then to the "bleach". He was rambling about use inside the body and did mention "injection", but he wasn't specifically advocating something, and when asked to clarify a few moments later he explicitly said he didn't think it should be injected.

Was it loose talk and pretty dumb? Absolutely. Did the media exaggerate and lie about it for years as a political talking point? Of course! Such is life in modern America.

He never advocated injecting hydrochloric acid.

Those facts don't support your conclusion. The popular vote is not even close to "a majority of Americans". Something like 120 million American adults didn't even vote in 2016, versus around 66 and 63 million who voted for Clinton and Trump respectively. Clinton winning would still have been "minority rule" by this measure.

Also, broadly speaking, being progressive means wanting change and being conservative means being more comfortable with the status quo. It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote, more of those would be latent conservatives. Or at least, it’s very hard to see a progressive majority in there.

It's not wild. It's precisely what they did in 2015, as revealed by WikiLeaks: https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig...

There are a lot of cases where a small minority is heavily invested in a topic at the individual level, while the majority (who have an opposing view) are not. The small minority has the incentive, the energy, and the time to keep fighting for their narrative, while nobody in the majority makes the same effort as none of them individually have as much skin in the game. This dynamic plays out all the time on Wikipedia.

Yes, but the SNB and FINMA (and the Federal government) will try many other things before it comes to that.

You could always ask the Financial Stability Board:

https://www.fsb.org/2022/11/2022-list-of-global-systemically...

How is that relevant? You said: "It does not have a significant retail presence." Meanwhile, CS does have a massive retail presence, in Switzerland, and has done for 150+ years.

What? CS has a massive retail bank. It’s their most profitable division and has existed for 150+ years.

CS operates in 50+ countries. All the largest entities have resolution/winddown plans agreed with their regulators. In reality they probably won’t be used because the SNB and Fed will fear contagion.

They are a bit less important than they once were in terms of volume, but they are still massively interconnected with the rest of the system. There is zero chance they‘re just left to implode without governments and central banks stepping in.

Not a chance of a natural implosion. CS is one of a very small number of globally systemically important banks.

"depositors lend their money to a bank, for which they are paid interest, and banks lend that money out"

... isn't how banking actually works.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

It was a real initiative using a real company which specialises in this. They just aren't very good at preserving the intent of the author and the nuance of the text. Which is exactly what we should expect of any censor.

https://www.inclusiveminds.com/

The prison issue wasn't the only straw but I believe it was the last one.

It wasn't just that her government tried to put a male rapist in a female prison, after ignoring years of warnings that self-id would cause this to happen.

It was that when questioned, she repeatedly demonstrated that she was either unable or unwilling to grasp the logic of the situation and address the mistake with integrity. Instead she continued trying to square the circle.

I call them complexifiers... because that's their habitual response to problems. I prefer to hire simplifiers (within reason).

Some complexifiers are not nearly as smart as they seem - they can often have tunnel vision due to their brilliance in specific domains, and miss the big picture. Which puts them in the "dumb and gets things done" quadrant: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/27/dumb-and-gets-thin...

A lot of mainstream banks felt uncomfortable about getting involved with crypto. But at the tail end of a monetary bubble when everyone is chasing yield, the pressure from your board, your major investors, and your trend-following employees can be impossible to resist. It's just easier to go with the flow. But after FTX, the hype is dead and they can quietly shelve their projects and move on.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. — John Maynard Keynes

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one. ― Charles MacKay

You're mixing up cause and effect. When you make terrible architectural choices, it leads to the other problems you mention. You can't build a house on quicksand, no matter how well your views are aligned, or how certain you think your timelines are.

All the big banks have projects like these. As soon as the hype fades and the CIOs can stop telling their board "yes we're investing in blockchain", the projects will be cancelled.

I'm mainly referring to the technical leadership.

Bingo. Adverse selection in action... they've created a "market for lemons".

All the offshoring and outsourcing (and cultural disdain for technical people) means they can no longer tell the difference between charlatans and good tech leaders. But the good people know how to avoid them.

The picture was always bleak. Cheap money and FOMO just stopped a lot of people seeing it.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” - Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Hot off the press:

"They were building a Frankenstein’: how ASX’s blockchain unravelled" https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afr.com%2Fcompanie...

Some people are blaming "tech nerds" for having too much influence over the project. Really the problem was charlatans. If they had hired good tech people the blockchain concept would have been binned years ago.

Another win for the Australian tech scene. Optus, Medibank Private, ASX... just embarrassing.