graemep

No racial categories map well on to genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

Even less so in the US with its weird categories that confuse the rest of us: I have never figured out how people with lighter skin then me (mixed white and south Asian) can be "black" or whether Spanish people are "hispanic".

OOps, I meant to type death of a quarter of the population of Cambodia, not the world!

Too late to edit now.

Last century saw two world wars, followed by the cold war which could have lead to the end of the world. Also a wave of communist revolutions and their aftermath (famines and purges in the Soviet Union, The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the death of a quarter of the population of the world).

I think mismanagement is not accurate. The Soviet system was flawed and inefficient and could not compete. The European empires were made untenable by the world moving on: economic, technological and political changes.

I think Europe and America had a golden age when they were at peace and dominated the world economically from the 80s to this century, and forgot neither of these is a given.

You are right. People are misusing "capitalist" to mean someone who favours a capitalist system, where as it actually means someone who posses capital; someone whose relies on possession of assets rather than earned income.

1. I mean static documents plus decent search you can find the right documents.

2. Yes, but its difficult to get a chat bot to function well over the wide range of services a government offers and the wide range of users who need government services.

One of the most annoying chatbots I have ever come across was on a UK government site. The DVLA. "lets tell you what you already know and not answer the question".

Possibly something well designed might make it easier, but I have found most of gov.uk to be very usable and helpful.

So a single VM with multiple containers within it? Interesting, but I think you should make it immediately clear on your site. Persistence is not the USP because there are lots of ways that you can get persistent VMs or sandboxes.

This is most useful to people who run Linux as their daily driver so rather than saying its like WSL can you explain what it offers that existing Linux containers do not?

Its also sounds different from WSL which I thought is a VM rather than a container.

> It's yet another step in my long journey to keep my host installation free from all the changing and breaking dev dependencies that force a reinstall every few months.

Something that also require a bit of explanation. What do you do that makes this such a common problem.

They can be with decent search and if well organised. gov.uk works pretty well as it is and I suspect adding a chatbot would make it worse.

I do not know about all Unix like OSes, but Linux has sandboxes you can run as you main user. Not as safe as running as a separate user and sandboxing, or running in a VM, but reasonably solid.

> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.

Agreed, but what can you do about your OS vendor?

What I have noticed in the UK is:

1. health concerns mean moderate drinkers drink less, but heavy drinkers have not changed their habits 2. young people seem to go more to extremes: either drink a lot or be teetotal.

I do not know the US well enough to comment, but the US has always been a lot more anti-alcohol than (almost anywhere in) Europe.

> Not a theologist, but pretty sure that the default destination for the bad Christians is hell.

Absolutely not.

> There is an out-of-hell card you can get if you pay your dues to the local enforcement branch (before you die, they need today’s money not after life checks)

Where did you get that from?

I am assuming you are just badly informed but that is really stretching the assumption of good faith.

The Catholic church believes hell is self chosen:

> To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called "hell."

https://ccc.cab/1033

Traditional protestants often believe the same, but there is variety. Some believe all human beings are redeemed, for example.

Some evangelicals do believe in hell for non-believers, but most of those also believe faith is the key to redemption, so you are safe if you are a Christian.

Its not demographics, its American cultural influence.

I think it demonstrates the extent to which left and right are artificial groupings that owe more to tribalism than anything rational.

In the UK it was the right wing Conservative party which introduced same sex marriage. I am pretty sure the Republicans are unlikely to do that.

Of course some things are clear. Privatisation is right wing, nationalisation is left wing, but you never really had the latter in the US!

That is true of some religions - e.g. moralistic therapeutic deism. It is sort of true of Buddhism because of belief in karma, but that is an automatic mechanism rather than a punishment.

It is not true of Christianity, which promises forgiveness, nor of the other Abrahamic religions.

If you jump a red light you are a scrote.

Does the EU have the power to block sales of companies on national security grounds? Or to get member states to standardise on software?

Its probably a good thing they do not have a standard, or at this point it would be Windows and pushing change through at the EU level would not be fast.

> but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems

Last time I looked it was a Swedish owned German company. The government of the Netherlands has limited power there. Given its history and performance its quite likely to get sold and might end up in American or Chinese hands or anything really.

The customers care about the quality of a bike repair. They will pay more for a better repair, and will not return to someone who does a shoddy repair.

The owner, and probably user, of a bike is the person paying for the repair. It is to their advantage to ensure it is a good repair.

People expect a repair will be good, and will blame the person who repaired it if not. With software people often blame themselves for issues, and they have no expectation of quality. They also cannot tell quality until after they are committed to using it. Bike shops do not benefit from vendor lock-in.

> Having the opinion that there should be restaurants, stores, and bathrooms only for white people was an acceptable, mainstream political view during my father's lifetime.

Only in the US, South Africa and Rhodesia.

Same sex marriage did not exist anywhere in the world until very recently, and still does not exist in most of the world.

Some of the teachers I meet in the UK are very unhappy with conditions (bureaucracy, pressure to hit metrics), but violence is rare.

The hedging in hedge funds comes not because they are intended to hedge risks you have from elsewhere, it is because they (traditionally) hedge against market risk, to seek absolute returns rather than measuring against the market.

Fund managers in general cannot beat the market because beating the market is a zero sum game.

I agree that bit is wildly optimistic, but its still not a claim that climate change is not real and it does not really change his main points that they are idiots.

I think a bigger problem in the context of the article is that they are not intellectuals.

Economics is always political, and economists advice reflects that. Other fields can be political, economics remains largely "political economy" with a pretence at neutrality.

Its not the ECB - many central banks are doing the same for the same reasons.

He is calling Just Stop Oil idiots. He is saying its idiotic to vandalise paintings.

That is very different from a claim that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic.

Its good for the buyers, and good for broader society and the economy.

Its bad for vendors.

Why would vendors do something that is bad for them? HN is full for people talking about how to create a "moat" for their products. Why do you expect hardware vendors not to want to do the same?

> I am both validating your experience, and rejecting your analysis.

My analysis is based on facts and observation.

Yours is based on what exactly? It is contradicted by the observed facts.

You seem to think kids always do what their parents show they want them to do, which is detached from reality.

> You replaced the rote recitation of faceless homework with engagement from an authority. She was not interested in the sequence of numbers, but interested in your interest. S

She was quite capable of expressing what she was not interested in. You are just refusing to take experiences that do not match your preconceptions.

There is a huge different between engagement and "being informed by an authority figure" which implies they have no choice.

> She loves you, and is reflecting your engagement back at you in hopes of getting more validation. Children do that a lot.

Read the blog post. She demanded more of things she enjoyed rather than what I wanted her to do (finishing her home work). That is not seeking validation.

> If somebody hadn't (brutally) drilled the concept of numbers into her skull, the sequences of random symbols would not mean anything to her.

No, nothing brutal needed to drill the concept. You can teach very gently and make it fun.

> Engaging with your child, who has already been partially socialized, is not proof that this socialization wasn't necessary. For that, you would have to have locked your daughter in the basement for those 7 years, and then find that she was spontaneously able to do multiplication

Strawman. I did not say socialisation was not necessary, I said it did not have to be brutal.

> I hope you understand that _brutality_ as spiritual. It's the brutality of going against nature, of putting a monkey in a suit and locking it in an office for 8 hours a day to feed itself.

Who gets locked in an office?

> but they sure as hell don't learn it from eating candy and watching Minecraft let's plays.

That would be neglect. no one things complete neglect is bad.

> I hope you understand that _brutality_ as spiritual. It's the brutality of going against nature

nature is a lot more brutal than modern life.

From your first link:

"A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an "international patent", and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority."

So, actually, No.