indubitable

Again, I don't think you're considering the scale of loss there since these numbers are so huge. Let's look at it another way. We could kill literally every single person in Syria/Yemen/Libya/Iraq/Afghanistan/Somalia and it still wouldn't even be remotely comparable to the scale of loss of WW2. You'd be a shade over half way there. And like you mentioned this is something that's been going on for many years. All that death in WW2 was compressed into 6 years - most of it within 3.

When we look at the minuscule fraction of the real loss of life in the Mideast it's completely and absolutely negligible compared to the sort of wars we've had in the past. And that's largely due to the fact that modern nations no longer fight. If nations like China and the US were capable of fighting each other without mutually assured destruction, we would have. And that is a conflict that almost certainly would have drawn in the entire rest of the world to one side or the other and the death toll there would dwarf WW2 and anything else - at least until WW4.

Instead we're approaching the centennial of WW2 meaning we have had generations live, and mostly die, without ever experiencing the sort of death and destruction that used to be regularly wrought in war. And for this, we can thank nuclear weapons.

It had nothing to do with reducing the actual damage done. Disemboweling an unarmed and yielding infantryman was considered perfectly chivalrous. Chivalric warfare only applied to the self preservation of those in power at the time, which would be the knights and other ruling class individuals.

The 'rules of war' are written by those on top, and they tend to benefit them. Chemical/biological weapons are relatively easy to make for smaller nations, and their development can be disguised. Nuclear weapons are the opposite on both accounts. As an aside, this is a recurring theme throughout history. Chivalry, for instance, had a not coincidental effect of ensuring that knights were very rarely killed in most battles.

Look for what can't be done in warfare and it tends to have a direct link to strengthening (or sustaining) the established powers at the expense of 'lesser' forces.

One thing I think many people fail to consider is that, contrary to perception, we have entered into one of the most peaceful eras in all of humanity, and nuclear weapons are likely largely responsible for that peace. It's easy to fail to see the peace amongst all the war, and the media anxious to report for weeks on end about any violent event of significant scale.

However, look at things in terms of scale. 9/11 was considered an atrocious and unprecedented event. 2,996 lives lost in a matter of hours. Look at something like World War 2. In World War 2 the total death toll was around 75 million with a world population of about 2.3 billion. That's 248 million lives lost scaled up to today's population. Think about that. That would be the equivalent of a 9/11 event happening every single day for 83,555 days. Or a 9/11 event every single day for 229 years.

That sort of loss of life is completely unimaginable. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of lives lost. The Mongol Invasions in the 13th century killed off 35 million people. The colonization of America resulted in deaths that are difficult to measure but it was also in the high tens of millions at the minimum.

But today even if we look at places we ignore, like Iraq, the high end of the death tolls there are around 1 million. And a big part of the reason for the dramatic decline in war is because of nukes. If not for nuclear weapons we would have long since had a World War 3 as Europe, China, and the US vied to determine whose ideology would become the world ideology. And it's extremely possible we could have seen the first war with a death toll in excess of a billion. Instead we live in an era when a few hundred people being killed in one act is something that shakes the entire western world for months.

Mutually assured destruction may be MAD, but it demonstrates quite clearly peace sustained by self interest alone is vastly more effective than any peace built on words and promises.

Interesting point the article indirectly hits on:

- "Chummy logrollers—a perception heightened in the social media age. In a 2012 Slate piece called “Against Enthusiasm,” Jacob Silverman wrote, “if you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer’s biggest fan.”"

I've always assumed studios had simply managed to, through some means or another, 'corrupt' most reviewers in a process similar that happened to video games. I wonder how much of the problem might be that people are now just too close to the things, and in particular the people behind the things, that they're reviewing? It's far easier to be "critical" (read: truthful) about things and people you have no connection to. But in today's world of social media, reviewers and the creators of the products they're reviewing are going to be in near direct, if not indeed direct, communication. Knowing full well that speaking honestly about a product could hurt people you've formed relationships with is not something easy to do.

For megafilms like "The Last Jedi" (currently at 90% on rotten tomatoes contrasted against 49% for viewers), how many of the reviewers have at least one direct relationship to somebody involved with the project? It doesn't need to be corruption. Plain old reluctance to be honest to those close to us or do them soft favors with no expectation of direct personal benefit -- that basic aspect of human nature would go a long ways towards explaining the deterioration of honesty in reviews. Or taking it to another level, we often wear rose colored glasses towards those close to us. This entire process might be entirely subconscious.

Check AirBNB. And keep in mind those prices can generally be negotiated sharply downward for longterm stays. He also need not continue to reside in one of the most expensive [housing] areas in Britain and the world for that matter. Healthcare in the UK can be provided for by entirely public systems. If he wanted to start a family he's just doubled his income and we can reduce the timelines involved in success here by at least ~30% (less than half due to compound interest being the secret sauce here + he obviously also increases his expenses in often nonlinear ways) -- even moreso if he finds a partner who has a more sophisticated skillset than moving boxes.

I think the thing many don't see is that in spite of people continuing to fail at life we live at a time when it's far easier than ever to succeed. But most people won't do the ideas espoused here since it requires discipline and planning. Instead they go drop their paycheck off at the pub, buy all the latest electronic toys with built in planned obsolescence, and so on. Or he finally hits $20k in the bank and then decides to go blow it on holiday to Asia.

We see a problem. We see a solution. And most everybody would agree, in a vacuum, that the solution does indeed work towards solving the problem. Yet, in social effect, it actually exasperates the problem. This is paradoxical, to me.

The $1400 was after he paid for eating/shelter. He's paying his parents $280 for rent - something he could do similarly by hooking up with some roommates. It's not glorious, yet he has the ability within his grasp to have an economic state of life that I suspect north of 90% of 40 year olds would trade their lives for. For a man who moves boxes for a living!

Here [1] is a calculator for investment fund returns. They're quite insane. Pick the absolute worst period for returns bust to bust 2000 to 2010 and you're still looking at a positive return. 1990 to present and you're looking at 10%. 2000 to present, going through both busts, is 6%. 2010 to present is 14%. 8% is not unreasonable - let's say it accounts for him possibly getting a raise sometime in the next 22 years.

[1] - https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

Except life isn't being made more miserable. It's paradoxically the rising quality of life that makes it seem this way.

Take a thought experiment and imagine we have 1000 people living under a single king all in complete filth and disgust, except for our king. Our people might be a bit jealous of the king but in general everything seems reasonably equal. Now imagine our king himself starts to feel guilty about the state of affairs and decides to begin progressive expansion. So he takes 50 of the people and grants them land and businesses giving them very comfortable lives.

Well people are kind of happy, but now there's certainly quite a lot of jealousy. It's not just one king, but a whole 5% of the population living head and shoulders above the rest. So the king realizes this and decides to make an incredible expansion expending much of his wealth in the progress. He now grants those 5% substantial estates and then grants a whole 20% the privileges and property just the 5% had before.

Again we'd expect society to be absolutely thrilled at the massive progress. But what this actually does is emphasize how shit the now 75% are. Instead of people being thrilled at people overall become wealthier, the 75% are now incensed. What's so special about those 25%? We want that too. As we, dramatically, improved society - society itself became even more incensed that it wasn't happening all at once. As we reach the point where the majority slowly become very comfortable, it would somehow paradoxically seem ever and ever more unfair and unjust.

Definitely a fair point. On the other hand without that investing jobs like these would not exist. Is Amazon destroying more lucrative jobs he could have otherwise had? Very possibly, but I think that's somewhat speculative. And it also ignores secondary effects of economic expansion. Amazon in turn helps countless other businesses grow and thrive which in turn provide more opportunity and jobs for people. So we can't only consider the jobs it may destroy but also the jobs which it creates. In the end, what is the net effect? That's an extremely complex question to answer, but I suspect living in a world where you can get $25k a year for moving boxes is more likely a positive than negative indicator of overall effect.

According to the article he's putting away 1000 pounds, or about $1400 per month. Let's imagine he puts all his money into an index fund and they continue hitting about 8%. He's a millionaire before his 40th birthday, if he started when he was 18. And that's if he never receives a raise or finds a better paying job. And at that point he's pulling in $80k a year in growth/interest alone.

That's not an easy 22 years, but on the other hand that this sort of life outcome for somebody who's job is basically moving boxes is possible seems like huge success of our economic system. And that's in the worst case scenario of him never finding more productive work.

And these are jobs people 100 years ago in this country would have given anything to have, and ones millions today, perhaps even billions, would still give anything to have.

And Amazon's margins are far smaller than you're implying. Their latest quarterly had a profit margin of 0.59%. They have more than half a million employees and a net income of just ~$2.4 billion. Imagine they give a modest $1000 raise to all their employees. That'd be more than $500 million or about 23% of their entire net income. Mass increases in labor to the point that the hourly requirements of each employee substantially decreased is simply out of the question.

In looking at wealth inequality, I think we lose track of how many of us there are. If you received just $1 from each person on Earth you'd be the 175th richest person in the world. $15 per person and you'd be, by far, the richest person alive. And that also goes the other way - even the richest are diluted to very little on the scale of the populations of this place we live in. If every single dollar or produced value, at least according to GDP, was perfectly evently distributed in the US we'd each get about $52k a year. Getting about half the average for moving boxes doesn't seem like something that screams catastrophe to me.

The problem with this is that people like this then tend to train and go on to do phenomenally well with extreme ease. In the physical domain, Mike Tyson is a good example. He was 'discovered' by a detention counselor when he was 13. 2 years later he would be the junior olympic world champion for two years in a row. Then he went professional and won his first 19 fights by knockout, 12 in the first round. He then went around and won every world championship belt there was - getting his first world championship title 8 months before he was old enough to legally buy a beer.

For the mental realm you have people like Srinivasa Ramanujan [1]. He had next to no formal training in mathematics yet would contribute immensely to a wide array of mathematical fields before the end of his brief life, dying at 32.

Surprisingly well written and balanced article in today's world of demonizing those we disagree with and deifying those we agree with. Something increasingly lost in the noise is that in the end we're all just people -- something that this article emphasizes.

It's covered in the index, along with 7 different sub topics: https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/z-index#C Alternatively, searching for "climate change" using the EPA site search yields 5,290 surprisingly well presented results.

I'd agree that it should be listed as one of the main topics on the front page given its relevance. Trump's appointee doesn't because of his own personal biases. That's pretty much the end of it. Drawing an analog between it being removed from the front page drop down and China censoring Tiananmen Square is needlessly hyperbolic and sensationalistic.

Commercial crew tests (SpaceX/Boeing taking astronauts to the ISS) begin this year with plans for the first crewed flight in June. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development#Fl...

Price per MB is a questionable metric that I think the author made insufficient effort to justify. The PS3, for instance, sent game sizes skyrocketing in an effort to try to demonstrate the perks of blu-ray. A number of games included all audio localizations on each disc in lossless formats. That likely saved studios money since localized distribution could all come from the same production line, but it sent the $/megabyte way down which this author implies means studios are earning less. It's a nonsensical datum without some justification and that justification was not provided in this article.

I also think that that datum leads to questionable conclusions. For instance you're paying vastly more for AAA games today than you were in the past. The author is right that the upfront cost is certainly much lower, but we've changed from a model where you're paying for a fully fleshed out game to one where you pay for a stripped down product that is intended to be sold piecemeal. In many cases users are paying to unlock content that is literally already on the disc they purchased. That first $60 you pay is simply your "starter pack." And there are additional 'meta costs' as well. Instead of simply putting the game in and running it you're instead obligated to pay an annual fee to use your own internet connection and then exposed to various advertisements on your way to launching the game and games themselves increasingly even feature more advertisements on their launch screens. These advertisements, in effect, increase the cost to the player if we assume they are effective.

Why not use profit margins? Total revenue / (total development + total marketing)? In either case, it doesn't really matter. Games are like music in that they are self sustaining since people will continue develop them even absent a profit motive. This is even more true today thanks to platforms like Steam removing the necessity of publishers from the entire industry. Seeing the end of 'fee-to-pay' or AAA games would bother me no more than seeing the end of Justin Biebers.

If not for massive government bailouts GM and other "BigCo" companies would likely already be dead. In 2009 the US government dumped $50 billion into GM alone just to keep it afloat, taking a $10 billion loss when divesting.

The self driving battle is going to be complex, unprecedented, unpredictable, rapid, and probably dirty given the stakes. These are not generally the sort of conditions where old behemoths tend to shine.

A few things in no particular order.

1 - It's not holding back anything. If this invention has any merit, it will be licensed and society at large will benefit from it.

2 - Incentive. If this inventor could not make a guaranteed profit from this idea, I imagine he could have found more interesting ways to spend his time than playing with floating point numeric representations. It's not like he stumbled upon this on the road and then hid it from society. He set out to create things like this as a means of sustaining himself and improving the world at the same time.

3 - The reason markets are useful is because they work phenomenally well at determining value. As we swapped to currency operated markets over barter, nobody ruled a chicken was worth 3 coins, a pig 10, and a cow 25. Instead market forces decided, and tend to do better than any other means of measuring value. Donations, let alone bureaucracy, are extremely poor substitutes in determining the value of anything. Their ideal would be to approach market force level efficiency. This isn't to say markets are flawless, but rather they're a whole let less flawed than any alternative.

I don't think it can be taken as an assumption that "social systems" in the digital space can exist as a net social positive. The most fundamental problem in all groups is that 'well received' messages are far different than 'good' messages. And the feedback and filtering mechanisms in all current digital social systems strongly incentivize the former over the latter. And I don't think there's any particularly good way to solve this. Even in real life large purposeless gatherings of mostly bored people rarely leads to desirable things.

I think entering a profit motive is not inherently a bad thing. When companies have a profit motive, there tends to be an extrinsic motivation to do well. When companies are able to survive on donations alone, you're relying entirely on intrinsic motivations that may not be as strong as we'd like to imagine.

Take for instance the Red Cross and Haiti as one of the most visible recent examples. They received half a billion dollars and achieved next to nothing. 25% [1] of that half billion was spent on "internal expenses." And they have very little clue or accounting of how the remaining money was even spent. Most of it was not even directly spent but instead donated to other nonprofits, who in turn took their cuts, and accountability quickly breaks down. According to that reporting from NPR, the "ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes" from that half a billion dollars.

That sort of waste and lack of any accountability is something that would rarely fly in any for profit business. Would that money in Haiti have been better spent by entrepreneurs looking to create housing/food and other necessities with open intentions of profiting in the long run? Maybe not a fair question since they'd have had to have tried hard to spend it worse, but that's the whole point. Aligning a good service with a good profit is, in my opinion, the true soul of capitalism. It's just such a shame that today it's often easier to make more money in less than ethical ways.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-fin...

This is certainly the first level justification, but it's somewhat unusual isn't it? Find the most repressive regimes in the world and there's a good chance you'll find most of the big western names happily advertising and helping sustain the regime. We could argue that perhaps it's companies working to satisfy the market, but the people that work to call out advertisers are most often a very tiny minority of all customers. And in any case things like boycotts rarely last longer than the 10 seconds it takes for a new controversy to erupt on social media.

So what is their aim? The only thing I can frame it as is a power play. Advertisers working together to collectively ensure they have more strict control on what they can be advertised on has the nice side effect of them getting to decide the fate of many companies dependent on advertising for revenue. If a company acts in a way contrary to the interests of advertisers, they thus gain the ability to destroy that company. Similarly, it allows them to elevate companies that further their interests. Put another way, I wouldn't expect a documentary detailing the behaviors of Coca-Cola in South America or Nestle's behaviors... anywhere... to see much in the way of funding. But a documentary detailing healthy at any size? That's some advertiser worthy content.

The funny thing is I would have agreed with you before I ended up in a position where such choices have meaning. I, and I suspect yourself, have never been in the least patriotic or nationalistic and always held things like 'support the home team' with disdain since, as you said, why should I particularly care if something happens to occur in the same general geographic location where I happened to be?

I've spent a good deal of my life traveling away from US borders, and I'm far from pleased about the current direction of the US - and I've never been what you'd consider patriotic or nationalistic. Nonetheless, I somehow have a very different feeling towards the US than I do to any of the countries I've visited - even ones where I could now obtain citizenship if I so desired.

I think country forms a bond much like family. And much like with family, many of us never even recognize that bond until you're far removed from it. By contrast, I've very much enjoyed my travels but I hold no allegiance to any of these countries - even ones I've resided in for years. I can't really explain it, since I never thought I'd feel this way. I suppose what I'm getting at is that you can't really judge, or predict, people until you've walked a decade in their shoes.

I think you're substantially understating the difficult in recruiting spies. Any mistakes there and the recruiting nation would not only end up with double agents but also expose their handles, methods of contact, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that you'd need, as a foreign nation, to know more about the loyalties of intelligence agents than the country they're working for.

And similarly, I think you're greatly exaggerating the difficulties in obtaining US citizenship. It's a process that can take as few as 4 years. And thanks to our laws, people can simply have children in the US and they are automatic citizens.

And there's the third option that sort of meets both these opposite extremes in the middle and that's simply recruiting people already within the nation. Given the reported brain drain of the US intelligence forces, getting a substantial fraction of valuable targets (computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers, etc) into positions of intelligence does not seem like it would be all that improbable. Countries like China are already at a major advantage here given the huge numbers of Chinese involved in STEM.

- By the time the technology is at the 99.999% level, the game will already be over.

- Things are legal by default. If self driving vehicles are not explicitly made illegal by a state, they are legal.

- Peoples' trust changes rapidly. I think as a culture we've become much more scared of technology and change, but the change from horses to internal combustion engines and brakes was many magnitudes 'scarier' than having AI manage navigation.

Uber, and I imagine Lyft, are banking on automation. So what is sustainability? Self driving vehicles, at scale, could profitably provide service for a lower cost per mile than a person who owns their own vehicle. And that industry is going to have incredibly rapid growth likely culminating in a monopoly that could yield the largest company in existence. We drive in the ballpark of ~300billion miles per month [1]. Consider the worldwide market. A profit of even just a few cents a mile starts to look very insane very fast.

[1] - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring...

The military has to have contingencies in place for if all satellite communication were disabled, through some method or another. Should symmetric warfare between modern nations ever break out, satellite comms would be one of the most valuable and ostensibly poorly defended targets. You can't really assume much of anything about the status quo in planning for war.

I understood your comment perfectly well I believe. But this is our fundamental disagreement. If you can think back to even your middle school class, you would do far better than random at 'guessing' who was going to 'make it.' I didn't really realize how apparent this was until I taught for some time.

In school I felt I always worked hard, or was somehow more incentivized for the work than others. The harsh reality, apparent in hindsight, is that I was lazy and it came to me easily - as it does to many people. In teaching you one begins to quickly appreciate that inherent differences between children is absolutely night and day - and these differences emerge even as early as elementary.

These inherent differences are the giant elephant in the room that nobody wants to consider. In my opinion ignoring them and pretending that all we need to do is give more opportunity or money to some schools is doing us all great a disservice. A near majority of the kids in the classes I taught I could personally adopt and give them 24/7 attention and education at home and I suspect they would still fall well below the curve.

What is the solution? I have absolutely none. But at the same time I think that complete and open honesty and assessment is the first step to resolving any problem. When we start with false assumption as its more socially palatable, is it any wonder that we spend all of this money with absolutely nothing to show for it?

For now the technical aspects of cryptos are simply not all that important. We're still in the incubation phase where crptos are being used as assets instead of currencies. And at this point all that matters is public perception and security, which go hand in hand. And I think the lack of any individuals behind Bitcoin also greatly benefits it. The team behind Ethereum, for contrast, somewhat belies the notion of decentralization - even moreso after they chose to unilaterally roll back "their" ledger.

The next phase begins when 'regular' people are engaging in at least occasional direct exchanges of currency using private wallets to purchase goods/services. That would highlight the technical issues with Bitcoin, but even then I suspect Bitcoin will remain the top dog as a store of value and we'll collectively choose a runner up for rapid exchange/verification. It might not even be an independent coin itself, but a strap-on tech that helps protect against double spend, even if with a sub-100% accuracy in exchange for speed. The idea there being that it would primarily be used to mostly validate small-value transactions, with an inherently reduced double spend incentive, whereas big value transactions could go through the main coin.

Can you explain why you think that these notions should end for people, let alone from the perspective of a company? I'd fully agree that living to work is undesirable, but in this case I don't think that notion applies since development opens an infinite number of doors to anybody with the ambition and skill to make it work for them.