michaelscott

We're talking about renewables? How is that frying the planet?

Humans have also been gambling for thousands of years (which is just playing games with the added component of money on the line), so by this logic there's value in it too. I would also be interested to see the worldwide energy consumption of all gaming devices in comparison to the worldwide energy consumption of all crypto mining, especially now that many have moved to proof of stake.

Considering the explosion in the gaming industry in recent years you may find that it outpaces crypto already, or is catching up very fast.

Economics are fully at work in every market, including renewables. If it's more profitable to... I'm not even sure what your alternative would be but I'll say feeding the energy back into the grid, then miners would do it. It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy, especially off-grid renewables, just because you perceive their use to be "wasteful"

Everything expends energy in order to solve some problem or accomplish some goal. Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. If it can solve more problems then the expending of energy becomes more justified.

Note that even with Seldon's predictions, a requirement for their fulfilment was that the predictions not be made public so that they would not be altered. The difference in economics and psychology, unlike in chemistry or astronomy, is that these fields are self-reflective. They have an "awareness" of themselves as disciplines and can change and act on information of themselves to in turn gain new "awareness" and behaviour.

Economics is even worse, as it does hold to some fundamental aspects of finite resource allocation and supply/demand in addition to the self-reflectance. This means its model is probably some hybrid of physics-like fundamentals and the weird self-awareness of the "soft science" disciplines.

99% of models developed in open view in both fields are either generally wrong in practice or are "correct" insofar as they were correct at one point in history or set of circumstances, but have since been factored into the efficiency of the system and are no longer relevant. Thermodynamics is a nice analogy for a lot of effects in economics, but it's important not to stretch that analogy like butter over too much bread

There are a number of reasons this wouldn't work, especially once the thieves have figured this out. They'll then be incentivised to stop the bike for both the phone and the bike, and before you as the driver were able to remote block both items would have been bricked by the thieves. It's easy to take apart an electric bike, especially the ones that have been customised.

Agreed with the treating of employees properly though, these guys go through the ringer just from regular customers and order systems I can't imagine adding thieves to the mix.

Yeah I suspect this is the case, the original intention and structure was solid but it's been progressively shifted into that FAANG space. I think the only solution is probably a question tailor made to the company interviewing, that doesn't rely on leetcode-style approaches to solve.

This is fine as general life advice, but in a business context I've never seen this lead to anything other than exploitation of the more honourable party. I get where it's coming from and I try to do the same myself, but there's a fine line between being honourable and being self-destructive in the face of other options (strategies, if we want to keep to game theory terminology).

Is that what you really end up testing though? As parent mentioned this can be broken by simply memorising, so are you sure the candidate is a good problem solver or are they just good parrots?

The alien is hypothetical, a proxy point of view that's theoretically unbiased and has no awareness of human social context, history, etc.

The principles of a grid-based design are still adhered to though. This isn't "gridless" in any real sense (other than maybe its handling in CSS?) from a design perspective. Maybe a better term is "adaptive grid" or something similar, which would make more sense in the design for something in a shifting and dynamic medium.

I think half the success of this approach is due to culture as well. I know in my home country, an approach like this would definitely not work and you'd be stuck with unemployed squatters with slow legal recourse to get rid of them (and if you have to get rid of them are you really successful in the first place?).

I think the article is talking about estrangement proper, where children and parents do not talk to each other at all, not that they engage but sometimes don't understand one another. The former is more serious, the latter is expected.

The standardisation of medium of exchange is not only ancient, it's also universal. Shell currencies are found in isolated North American tribes and standardised silver ingots have been found in ancient Chinese digs. Fungible currency seems to be an absolute fundamental in any human economy.

Irrelevant. These currencies are traded on forex exchanges outside their native countries, which means outside the jurisdiction of said police.

I think the problem in our case specifically is that we centralise our food production, unlike other animals. Given our population size this sort of makes sense, but what you end up with is these death factories of concentrated animal slaughter. I would say the energy argument isn't a good one; factory farms are maximally efficient by design (which is why they're terrible for the animals) and humans definitely waste very little to nothing in these facilities since every inefficiency costs money.

I definitely think there's a disconnect between the average person and their food and it allows this sort of thing to happen more easily. I'm not sure what the right way to handle it all would be until we can 3D print all our food needs, but free range farms and farming animals that require less space (such as insects) are probably the best we can do currently.

Orcas are known to play with seals they've killed and never eat as well. Chimps also participate in clan wars [0]. I'd venture to say that the more intelligent an animal the more capacity they have for needless killing, or at least killing for reasons other than food. What that says about humans specifically I'm not sure, but what I dislike about these conversations is the need to feel like we are so special compared to other animals. We are unique and I'm positive we'll reach a point where we won't need to kill animals for food, but we're not there yet and until then we'll need to be a responsible component of the natural food chain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

> If I started my own country in the middle of the ocean and started issuing my own currency it would be worthless.

Not necessarily, if you were using it within your own country, the use case for most currencies. A fiat currency is little more than a promissory note or IOU (think about how I could go to a bank and exchange my dollar for a dollar's worth of gold during the gold-backed fiat period). In fact, less than 200 years ago many banks were able to issue their own currencies as promissory notes in many US states and were valid, but only with those banks.

The idea of an all-powerful national currency that bans all others is relatively new from a global perspective and even today, there are parts of the world where small communities have and still do issue their own local currencies in order to facilitate local trade.

> Fiat is backed by weapons. The same weapons that defend your house from other countries and force you to give up half your salary

This is a very American view of fiat (and governmental role in general). It's a logic that only works if you're talking about the strongest military and associated country out of all alternatives, and at this point it falls apart. How do weapons protect the value of the Angolan kwanza or the Singaporean dollar? Neither of these countries could do anything militarily if a sizeable number of countries did not support their value.

Ah I didn't realise the Hollywood blacklist had been that serious! It's definitely not in my lifetime though, I wasn't around in the 50s. I'm also not sure that's a good example; you're talking about what could be termed a national security threat vs. something like saying you don't agree with unisex bathrooms. As I said, the scale is way out of whack.

I'd definitely be interested to see comparisons that are more like-for-like though, if they exist. I'm not familiar with "Time of the Toad", although from a brief look it seems to also deal with Cold War era issues? Again, this isn't a like-for-like comparison.

No I'm not saying the mechanism has changed, mob rule has probably been a thing since humans organised in groups larger than 5, but the scale and level of scrutiny definitely have.

I'm not familiar with the case of celebrities or Sinead O'Connor specifically, but no celebrity in my lifetime before the advent of this new wave of cancel culture has been completely cancelled the way they are today (even Michael Jackson, who had serious allegations of child molestation, had an O2 concert scheduled shortly before his death).

Even for the average person, if you lost your job due to anti-mob comments in the 50s that didn't bar you from ever finding a job again (which is the case for some today), and this is without even touching on the way some people have had their entire twitter history crawled and pulled apart from a time when they were generally very different people.

As I said, this is probably a function of social media in the modern era more than anything else.

In terms of getting people fired/removed/cancelled for remarks, yes absolutely. That may be a function of social media and the scale of communication in modern times, but either way the sensitivity of the vocal minority has definitely changed even in my relatively short life.

Wasn't referring to you specifically, but the idea of progress as a constant change made by the child generation which your comment alluded to.

The idea of the child generation always progressing from the parent is dangerously clouded by the immediate past and probably also very myopic.

Throughout history there are many instances where the child generation regresses the status quo by and large, sometimes over multiple generations. Even when there is progress in general, there may be specific aspects of society which do regress relative to the past. All I'm saying really is that we shouldn't look at all forward movement as necessarily moving upward.

Ah you're correct, my bad!

Absolutely this. My wife and I both grew up very poor and even though we've worked up to being relatively well off in adulthood, we both still have a mindset in certain contexts that's very similar to this article.

It's very scavenger-like and I suppose we may lose it if we manage to stay well off long enough, but it definitely colours our decision making even in little things. Being poor definitely stretches beyond the literally financial.

Do you mean the Hasek puzzle which starts Kb1 for white? Rh8 doesn't change the approach for white here, in fact the move order is exactly the same. You want to block the rook with the king for one move so that the white king has enough time to protect g2 before the rook arrives.

So move order (as I see it) would start:

1. Kb1 Rh8, 2. Rh6 Kxh6, 3. Kc1... etc.

I don't know if it's intentional separation of powers. The American culture is very individualistic, especially compared to the German. This just naturally means that American companies tend to "go it alone" in relation to the public sector for longer than they would in Germany.

Certainly when American companies get to the right size they seem to become much closer to the political bodies that matter to them and their interests, as is the case likely everywhere

I tend to agree with you. I think on the whole moving to more city states and fewer monoliths probably suits the way humans operate both as individuals and communities more. I also think we're probably at a point now where doing so won't lead to small scale wars city states experienced in the past, or at least far less frequently.