kingsuper20

Being nit-picky, there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize for economics.

> No politician could possibly admit it, but geopolitically, temperate climate countries are going to be net beneficiaries and will need to protect themselves from tropical and sub tropical countries.

In the case of Europe and Africa, I'd say that the main pressure will simply be one of demographics more than weather.

> Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.

It's probably fair to hold two ideas at the same time.

. Climate change is a way to accumulate rank and wealth in society.

. Climate change is real

It's interesting to ask what everyone is really after in terms of climate. Lack of change or natural events occurring. Would an upcoming ice age result in a cry for more CO2?

I like to think of it in terms of carrying capacity. Too many people results in environmental degradation (of all sorts), social unrest, scrabbling at the bottom for wages, squabbling at the top for status.

> In my experience, SMBs don't hire expensive software engineers.

I've definitely seen that at the 'S' end of the scale.

Programmers who have been there for years, often with no formal education, the codebase looks like them. They tend to be stuck in those jobs.

It's weird that urgent care clinics aren't parked right next to the ER and that the urgent care clinics aren't 24x7.

No doubt this occurs sometimes but I've never seen it.

Anecdata. My wife says that most people at the ER don't need an ER. Of course they serve as a primary healthcare for the homeless.

>Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit.

Imagine how much a developer with Coastal Commission expertise could charge. That's probably a specialty in itself.

>Copyright doesn't just benefit huge corporations. For instance, without it, independent artists who rely on copying for distribution (authors, musicians, etc.) would find it much more difficult to make money off their work,

That doesn't look like it's the point to me.

""[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right , to their respective Writings and Discoveries." "

As I read that, copyright is there to 'promote progress', not to maximize gains.

No doubt there is a million linear feet of case law that got us where we are.

Honestly, I rather like this whole question of copilot. I solidly appreciate the brilliance of github as a honeypot.

Personally, I think that voting is ridiculous, but I see the point.

It's one of the strongest methodologies for making a discussion board addictive.

I think an interesting feature to add would be to have peoples' user areas show how many downvotes they have spewed forth.

The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me up.

Please go on.

It could be that part of the problem is that you only see their public persona. Start adding all the weasel words to imply that you think that something is 73% likely to be mostly true and you lose an audience

Everyone (well, most everyone) could stand to examine their own problems (well, issues) with stating opinions as fact.

> Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell

It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.

I don't doubt that part of the pronunciation problem is the deeper meanings that creep in.

'CAESAR' sounds positively German and Legio VI Victrix has an effeminate sound. I'm afraid that Biggus Dickus had at least a little to do with attitudes towards proper Latin.

I like the idea of building massive apartment complexes in the Bay Area. It was a PITA place to live 30 years ago and it's worse now

The thing is, if we can build giant ant mounds in just a few places it'll save the central coast and California north of the Golden Gate from destruction.

Step two would be to connect the giant metro areas to the rest of the state via a dirt road.

> How many times do people need to be burned by closed-source, cloud boxes before they learn to stop buying them?

Probably when their thermostat turns off during a heatwave.

Downvoted and I still don't know what the '+' is.

Some sort of gender or kink letter? Code for a cyborg? Programming language?

Maybe we don't need contraception, we just need predators.

Offhand I'd say that you are doubling the plumbing system plus you are using a much more corrosive fluid.

It would be an interesting experiment, since toilets use a great deal of water. Take a beach town, build a separate pressure water and sewer system, see if it's worth it. It's certainly more complicated than a sailboat's set up.

In that case, the value of a thing is not it's physical reality but it's provenance.

I guess it's no different than the high value given to a lot of 20th C. art, it's just another form of marketing.

Maybe this bodes well for antique prices.

When I had to deal with some small tendril of IBM, I think the anti-trust suit was still in the works. It probably scarred their dealings with other companies to the same degree that their dominance did.

It seems to me that any system predicated on population levels over the pre-industrial standard are a sketchy proposition.

Even at the pre-industrial level, the environmental load has been high. Mediterranean goat deserts, death of large Pleistocene animals in the Americas, whale hunting. You could still have nuclear power, microelectronics, solar energy in a world with a whole lot less human meat roaming around on it.

I'd say that the main value of an over-complex tax code is to provide a moat for larger companies.

>I sometimes wonder if our level of technological advancement would even be possible without fossil fuels.

I don't. I'd say that fossil fuels were absolutely required.

Admittedly there was a ramp-up due to water-powered manufacturing and steam engines run by throwing in chunks of wood.

Thank goodness governments have always had a reputation for just behaviors.

If you cut to the chase and give them unlimited powers all sorts of moral improvements will take place.

>friends at a large dinner.

You might as well jump straight to a conspiracy charge.

>Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow.

I remember their stuff from the pre-Thinkpad era. Quite a company. Working for both a large competitor and for a small company that was trying to sell to them they seemed clumsy but still had an amazing portfolio.

My guess is that they just need to merge/break-up/reconfigure into oblivion. Just another AT&T/HP/ITT/Polaroid/Xerox

>You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of the craftsmanship that comes with creating art.

Perhaps art, going forward, is simply described as the process, not the result.

I don't doubt that a computer could (or will) produce a perfectly convincing Charlie Parker solo or Richard M. Powers painting. There really was less there than met the eye (or ear) and most of human output consists of cliches in any case.

My take is to become increasingly archaic and self-sufficient in interests. Greek red figure pottery looks like a good place to end up after the walls are filled with amateur art, but a kiln looks pricey.

>I am pretty sure if you had to get your water from one of these devices you would not be using it to flush toilets or other non-essential use.

Are you suggesting that toilets, showers, washing machines use salt water?

The average US citizen uses 82 gallons of potable water per day.

> When is the public going to realize the O&G industry is quite possibly the worst conglomerate that we have ever seen.

From an ecological standpoint, I'd tend to agree.

Without them, we'd still have a sub-one billion human population, the pollution level of the 18th C., plus you probably couldn't type that comment without winding up the computer first.

With most of the easy EROI gone, you do have to wonder how humanity can crawl back up from it's next collapse.

Clickbait title, it sounds like it's some huge movement, but I take their point.

It seems to me that the underlying issue isn't some sort of highly predatory company (Amazon in this case), a lot of them are or were.

The main trick is the ability to surveil and analyze employee activity. Imagine a 1950's auto factory where every location, utterance, and move by a worker could be gathered and parsed.

I'd say that programmers will get a good healthy dose of that going forward and WFH gave it a good healthy shove.