marcusverus

"Killing an Elephant" is great.

I second your recommendation of 'Politics and the English Language', it is absolutely essential reading. His prose is phenomenal. C.S. Lewis is another whose prose is a pleasure to read, with 'The Screwtape Letters' being his best IMO.

You get more of what you engage with. If you respond to ragebait--even to express your disgust--the algorithm assumes you want more ragebait.

The utter banality of constantly improving launch tech is, in its own way, just another testament to the great work being done by SpaceX.

SpaceX deserves a higher caliber of hater. This low effort hate is unworthy.

This is nonsense, obviously, but is a perfect validation of his point. Well done and enjoy the show!

This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.

Cybertruck? The best selling electric truck on the market?

Sublime. Thank you for sharing.

Is there anything more loathsome than an interviewee who fails to do the journalist's job for them?

The question is about one AWS facility. The headline refers to facilities. The guy's answer may well be an honest and truthful one.

All the Russia conspiracism in here reminds me of the claims that they blew up their own pipeline. The cost/benefit analysis of that situation was so obviously out of whack that no serious person should could have considered it to be a possibility.

This case is more plausible than that one was, but not by much. How could the benefit from derailing a few trains possibly justify the risk of A) more sanctions, and B) triggering NATO's Article V? The benefit of these operations is what, slowing trains down by one day? The 2022 sanctions on Russia have lowered their GDP by 6% by some estimates, which is the equivalent of turning the entire Russian economy off for three weeks of the year, every year. The notion that Russia would risk war and/or crippling sanctions to mildly inconvenience a tiny share of rail customers in The Netherlands is simply absurd. Putin makes plenty of mistakes, but he remains a shrewd adversary, and he is certainly not stupid.

I for one am disappointed that it took 500 years for people to acknowledge that the most important consideration when choosing a map is its emotional impact on the people of Africa.

> As the resolution itself states: "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation."

Beyond parody.

Let's reformulate it as a railroad problem. In the proposed hypothetical, if you effectively ban self driving cars until they're literally flawless, 50 people per day will be killed by human drivers every day. If you pull the lever and allow imperfect-but-better-than-human self-driving, 25 people per day will be killed by by autonomous vehicles.

As a reference point, non-suicide gun-related deaths total ~45 people per day.

What moral principle could possibly justify not pulling the lever?

You can't compare autonomous systems that drive hundreds of thousands of vehicles to a single person. You have to compare it to hundreds of thousands of people.

American drivers kill ~100 people every day behind the wheel of a car. If autonomy were 50% safer and was deployed at such scale that it replaced 50% of all hours driven it would save 25 lives every day. It would also kill 25 people every day.

Sadly, many people will clutch their pearls at inevitable headlines like Bloodthirsty Elon Sacrifices 25 Innocents on the Altar of Profit Every Day! and, their emotions sufficiently primed, they will happily pull the plug on autonomy, sending 25 people per day to their deaths and feeling great about themselves as they do it.

If the base universe is postulated to have always existed, why not do away with this theory altogether and simply postulate that our universe has always existed? Sure, our universes physics are conveniently balanced, which Occam's Razor abhors and which begs explanation. But this theory doesn't seem to satisfy Occam as it requires more rather than fewer assumptions (a capacity for infinite self-replication, complete with heritable and mutable physics).

If we're going to waive the need for a first mover, why not just waive it?

Occam's razor suggests that a coincidence is just a teensy bit more likely than a story surviving unchanged for a thousand generations.

"The tragedy of the commons" isn't a claim that "the commons universally leads to worse outcomes", but rather "the commons universally leads to worse incentives". The existence of a separate set of contradictory cultural incentives may prevent worse outcomes, but it doesn't change the nature of the incentives created by the commons, nor does it contradict the truth of "the tragedy of the commons", let alone render it fallacious.

The constitution says it is written to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", actually.

Brought to you by the guys who said Obamacare would lower premiums.

This is nonsensical. Debt-to-GDP over the course of an entire term is what matters. Debt was 77% of GDP when Obama took office and >102% when he left. The "change in deficit" is a useless measure.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Wow, are AI companies using mark to market accounting to claim decades worth of future earnings as though they were already realized? Are they recalculating past deals to meet quarterly earnings targets? Are they using SPEs to hide off balance sheet debt? Or is "Enron accounting" just a bullshit scare term that you've been credulously repeating ever since you read it on "GadgetReview.com"?

Sounds like it, yeah.

Save the aggressive ignorance schtick for Reddit.

> the average person is economically much worse off than all the European countries you just mentioned.

Where on earth did you get this idea? US Households have much higher disposable income (~50% higher than the Western European average) and much lower household debt levels than the average Western European country. See OECD links below.

> We literally spend more government money per person on healthcare than France does while having less public healthcare, precisely because of the "help the rich" policies causing most of that public money to go to subsidizing insurance companies.

Is this shocking display of government incompetence supposed to be an argument for increased spending, more government involvement, or both?

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-debt.html

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-financial-...

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-savings.ht...

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-disposable... (Select 2024 to see US data included)

Please flag. The only reason this attack vector isn't more common is the ignorance of would-be terrorists. The stochastic harm caused by sharing such articles is significant, IMO, and the public interest is low (nobody is going to stop flying because of a failed attack).

Is there anything more disingenuous that advocating for the involuntary destruction of all equity wealth by decrying occasional losses by consenting adults?

I'm sure this kills on Reddit, though.

It's hard to imagine a political solution to this problem. Both parties are playing chicken, each daring the other to fall on their sword for the good of the country, with neither willing to commit political suicide. Republicans don't have the stomach for the (unpopular) spending cuts that would be required to reduce the deficit, and of course they don't want to raise taxes. They reasonably fear that, even if they gutted the core programs to balance the budget, the next Democrat administration (whose election would be essentially guaranteed by massive cuts) would turn around and use the savings to fund new and exciting ways to buy votes. On the flip side, Democrats shriek in horror at the slightest spending cuts and even advocate for massive increases in spending ("Medicare for all" alone would cost another $1.5 Trillion per year) yet they are afraid to acknowledge, let alone levy, the (unpopular) broad-based taxes required to cover the current deficit, let alone pay for new programs.

It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons.