I don't understand why major arm contracts suddenly went from having obvious geopolitical implications (e.g. Turkey S-400 procurement) to being "mere contracts".
166 karma · joined January 9, 2020
Well, except for people born as women who take testosterone, then.
In 2012, when the top two candidates have ~50% of the votes & four candidates total are above 10%?
In 2007, when the top two candidates have ~50% of the votes & four candidates total are above 10% (note: note the same parties)?
In 2002, when the top two candidates have ~35% of the votes and the loss of the leading left wing candidate was blamed on too many different left wing parties fielding candidates and getting votes?
In 2002, when the top two candidates have ~45% of the votes & four candidates total are above 10%?
Same thing for 1995, 1988, 1981.
In the last US presidential election, the top two candidates got a combined 98.17% of votes. The next candidate got 1.18%. This is a completely different situation.
France is not a two party theater and suffers from the same thing.
Germany is not a two party theater and suffers from the same thing.
What is countries waging cyber operations against each other, if not politics?
That's the opposite of my point, really.
> And liberal arts courses are not necessarily easy today--especially at a good school. You'll be doing lots of reading and writing.
My point was about the "within university" variance of student levels rather than the "between university" variance. I have no doubt that a liberal arts programs in a good university is more selective than the CS program at a particularly non selective university. However, within any given college, I'd be surprised if the liberal arts program manage to get the above average students and the CS/Math/... programs get the below average students.
Difficulty of any given program at the undergraduate level is completely dependent on university policy. Maybe at the research level, you truly need to be more intelligent / harder working / whatever to succeed in math than in art history, but at the college level, you could do for instance:
- cram all that is taught in current undergrad, MA, and PhD (including the thesis) for art history in 4 years
- let CS students graduate if they can write any working program in any language of their choice
Tada! Art history is now the hardest degree in the college where only the best students aren't weeded out out; and CS is the easiest degree there is.
My point being that CS departments assuming prior levels of CS unlike other departments is merely an instance of a larger pattern.
> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before.
PG started writing essays about what he knows well (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well.
[0] quoted here https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm from there http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html#c8508
If competition and free markets are a necessary components of capitalism, then you would conclude - for instance - that the US stopped being a capitalistic country in the late XIXth century with so many prominent trusts. Or perhaps it never was capitalistic before WWII, since policy makers did not nurture competition but rather attempted to shield local industries from foreign competitions.
[0] Wikipedia definition: Ordoliberalism is the German variant of economic liberalism that emphasizes the need for the state to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential
[0] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544
Comparing the performance of laptop and desktop is a niche case. Most people know whether they want a laptop or a desktop and then choose among those categories.
The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that.
You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
Two more interesting metrics would be:
* how many applicants admitted actually enroll (and not go to some other college)
* related, bu what is the "rank" of the last admitted applicant: how far do they need to reach to fill their spots?
For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low.
If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.
Surely this means that "long covid" is not caused by the coronavirus infection itself, but by staying at home too much and a poor diet and not enough exercise. Is that not what this meant?
I note that your link astablishes that long covid is the thing, which the parent comment denies.
[0] unfortunately I only have a French source on this https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2021/03/22/epuisemen...
Europe (and the "West" aka where Europe sent its surplus citizens) went through its fertility transition [0] earlier than the rest of the world. Hence it increased its relative size as it experienced a high fertility / low death period, and decreased its relative size after it went to a low fertility / low death while part of the rest of the world went into their high fertility / low death phase.
So we can probably expect currently high population growth to transition to the low fertility / low death endgame. China is already well past it.
As far as I know, no country went back to a high fertility / low death scenario, though countries stabilized at various level of low fertility.
Most Western countries have institutions that rely on population growth (high debt that would lead to enormous debt per capita if the number of people decreases, unmaintained infrastructure, pay-as-you-go pensions...). So they will either have to fix their fertility rate in a dramatic way, massively reform many of the core institutions of society, or have high immigration & handle it well.