nrr

> Your feels are not proof.

No, but it's how I formulate hypotheses for testing. It's why that claim I labeled as verging on vacuously true is uninteresting: how the fuck do I even go about testing that?

> The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.

I fear I may be misunderstanding what you mean by parsimonious here. There's a scientific sense wherein there's an explanation that requires fewer assumptions, and in this sense, I'm still not understanding the argument you're proposing. Simplest hypothesis under what model? I think is the question I want to ask here???

The unfortunate part is that it's prima facie unclear that the climate system would be conservative in this way. I'll admit that's due to some ignorance on my part about how climate systems work, but it's also that ignorance that fuels an understanding that there are variables that I can't account for, let alone control for, which limits the kind of modeling that I can undertake to understand this problem (and, as a consequence, your argument, whatever that happens to be).

Forgive me if it seems like I'm asking stupid questions, but I'm legitimately trying to understand your contributions as positively contributory. I have no real priors for this that I'm trying to validate or invalidate.

I was asking more what argument you had hoped to add to this thread. The fact was quite clear, but the additional exposition around it made me raise an eyebrow.

You had made a remark in another post somewhere that there was an unfalsifiable claim in asserting that people will die from both extreme cold and extreme heat, and that claim is one I don't really find all that interesting. Mathematically, it's verging on vacuously true, very firmly in "Yeah, so what?" territory.

I'm more curious if there's some (minimally associative but preferably causal) relationship between those extremes that you might know about; e.g., for every linear step increase in heat deaths, we realize some exponential step increase in cold deaths.

Sorry, I'm unsure what your thesis is in presenting deaths due to extreme cold this way.

> one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic

It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.

George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.

For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.

It's kind of the same distinction between backups and restores, wherein the restores are what's important, but they're impossible without the backups to restore from.

One of the first things I do in any new-to-me project is set breakpoints in the integration tests and start stepping through the code so that I can establish some mental context. However, if there aren't integration tests, I begin writing them so that I can walk around with my debugger.

I'll push back against this slightly: learning what good code is requires debugging bad code, whether by way of a symbolic debugger or judicious use of printf() or breaking an algorithm down into its steps so that you can figure out its asymptotic behaviors.

I harped on checking someone's ability to debug code back when I interviewed candidates, in part because I found that people who could debug effectively could also sniff out bad code. It was something of a bonus that I also happened to select for candidates who could explain their debugging strategies and what that meant for the software they were working on.

The state of affairs in C and C++ is abhorrently bad. Not only is there `char` but also `signed char` and `unsigned char`, and the standards seem to leave the signedness interpretation of bare `char` up to the implementation.

Ada explicitly settled on `Character` being an enumeration type based on a specific character set encoding. When I learned Ada 95, the ARM specified the ISO 8859-1 character set for `Character`, likewise with `Wide_Character` and `Wide_Wide_Character` explicitly settling on 16- and 32-bit implementations of UCS. I wish more language specifications made decisions like this.

D following suit with tying its `char`, `wchar`, and `dchar` to UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 is commendable.

More to the point, MAUs are a measure of reach and not revenue or business health.

Looking at this from an investment standpoint (as if, e.g., I were establishing funding requirements for a pension fund or an annuity or some other such financial vehicle), MAUs are a nice to have because they can establish a counterfactual[0] for volume, but I'd be looking at the performance of X's products relative to the financial performance of X's customers buying those products (e.g., for advertisers, things like conversion and customer acquisition cost come to mind), legal exposure (because of, e.g., CSAM distribution) and other tail risks, and also whether there's an existential risk to the liberal democratic order that enables the financial vehicle I'm working with to operate at all, among other portfolio-level risks.

--

0: Well, kinda. The counterfactual actually comes in when we ask questions like, "If the reach changes, what happens to the economic performance?" Relying on MAUs as a baseline measure of the reachable population based on observation enables us to establish these kinds of counterfactuals.

> Minimizing shareholder value will flatten the economy.

Will it though? I'm curious what the empirical basis is for this causal claim, especially given that it ignores the wealth of gray area in between these two extremes. (That goes notwithstanding that I have zero idea what is meant by either "minimizing shareholder value" or how a flattened economy could look as an operationalized outcome. Neither of these are accepted terms of art with precise definitions.)

There are some obvious counterexamples to look at, wherein a hypothetical firm doesn't intentionally maximize shareholder value or chooses explicitly not to:

- A firm can choose to pursue long-term productivity gains;

- A firm can pay higher wages or provide better working conditions and still generate substantial shareholder gains;

- A firm can keep its earnings rather than pay dividends to have cash on hand for capital improvements; or

- A firm can accept a haircut on its margins to expand along some axis, like manufacturing capacity or market share.

Shareholder value is usually taken to be a function of the firm's expected future cash on hand (or, more precisely, the equity claims on that expected future cash on hand) and its exposures to various risks to that cash on hand (optionally quantified by people like me!), and the idea of maximizing shareholder value needs to be understood as having some kind of time horizon. Commonly, in the post-Jack Welch era, this time horizon is three months.

On a much longer time horizon, however, sacrificing short-term shareholder gains for long-term productive capacity can very well be analyzed as shareholder value maximization.

> Do you really want to live in a pre-industrial agrarian society?

This seems to treat the grandparent post's social insurance and institutional design argument that shareholder primacy has contributed to the institutional arrangement that makes intergenerational care difficult as though it means, what, capitalism is bad, so we should return to farming.

I'm unsure that I can draw a comparison between these two arguments. They're very different, and the parent post's reply doesn't establish the premise it needs. Industrialization and shareholder primacy aren't binary choices, and the mere existence of modern industrial prosperity doesn't establish the fact that our particular institutional arrangement producing it is in fact necessary for that prosperity.

> generals deciding to treat it as an opportunity for a show of force blowing them up intentionally

Only kinda!

„Hielt man fuer UFOs aus dem All / darum schickte ein General / eine Fliegerstaffel hinterher“ They believed that the balloons were unidentified flying objects from outer space. The general panicked and sent a squadron to investigate.

„Dabei waren dort am Horizont nur 99 Luftballons“ However, what they found were only 99 balloons.

Still, there was a problem: „99 Duesenflieger / jeder war ein grosser Krieger / hielten sich fuer Captain Kirk“ The pilots of those jet fighters thought of themselves as warriors on par with Captain Kirk (which is funny; Starfleet is primarily a scientific organization that only incidentally wields weapons).

The neighboring countries concurred: „Die Nachbarn haben nichts gerafft / und fuelten sich gleich angemacht“ They weren't able to suss out anything about these activities and felt provoked by them.

Here's where the war ministers make a show of force though: „99 Kriegsminister / Streichholz und Benzinkanister / hielten sich fuer schlaue Leute / witterten schon fette Beute / riefen Krieg und wollten Macht“ The war ministers brought a proverbial match and gas can to the whole affair. They thought themselves shrewd and crafty and could smell the scent of prey, so they called for war.

„Mann, wer haette das gedacht / dass es einmal soweit kommt / wegen 99 Luftballons“ Man, who could've thought that it came this far because of 99 balloons?

> 99LB was more popular even in the english speaking world

This song predates me by just a handful of years, so I never caught it during its radio heyday, but I can't verify this assertion from personal experience. Perhaps this is a UK-centric view? I'm unsure that much of this kind of cultural exchange made it to the US.

Pedantic clarification: The (original German) song itself didn't mention an actor in particular who had released the balloons, just that there were 99 balloons that flew to the horizon and jet fighters being scrambled in response. The epilogue tells of the consequent whole bunch of lasting destruction as the narrator talks about their patrols.

The English translation "99 Red Balloons" is considerably different as far as the details go.

> Fords, on the other hand, have an even, predictable quality. The same with my 72 Dodge. The windows still crank up and down nicely!

I don't know if I'd say they have an even, predictable quality, but on an actuarial basis, Detroit certainly makes for easier claim severity modeling than anything out of Ingolstadt, Muenchen, Stuttgart, or Wolfsburg.

That said, I don't really understand how quality maps to cars beyond what my comprehension of Japanese has allowed me to read about how Toyota's industrial engineering contrasts against Ford's. My first may have been a 1971 Opel GT that I salvaged by bringing home in parts on a bicycle-drawn trailer as a teenager, but I only ever wrenched on it. I never drove it.

> Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information.

No??? Revealed preference is dependent on what information is known. The analysis is made easier if the information is perfect, but that is not at all a prerequisite to being able to lean on revealed preference.

> In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!

Exactly! Consider though that, as the information landscape changes, so does the revealed preference. Notably, when things like TVs spying on their buyers comes to light, a preference can be revealed that buyers don't want TVs that spy on them.

Like, it's entirely rational for LG to want to hide this fact about their televisions, provided that they have the inkling that this would be unpopular. Their behavior in trying to suppress this press leads me to believe that they know exactly how unpopular this is, and they're trying to get away with it anyway.

> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.

I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery. It cuts both ways in that, sure, a company can offer a product on the market that no buyer asked for and have it sell well, but then, the media can expose some rather unsavory facts about that same product and subsequently (consequently?) have it not sell.

> Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?

It's worth picking this apart. Prices not mattering is usually expressed in economics-ese as price-inelastic demand, and that's usually not what's happening. Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.

Uh, what's the transmission mechanism for this?

It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.

The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.

--

0: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/hp548

> It’s very possible some of your proposals are similar, I’m not familiar with them specifically so I can’t say.

If I can ever get around to writing about it or polishing up what I have enough that I feel comfortable with someone else looking at it, I'll poke you directly about some of what I've been working on over on the Fossil side of things.

> If you’re familiar with citc/commit cloud, for example, we’ll be doing something along those lines.

Oh, hey, yeah. I'm not first-hand familiar with that tooling (I've never been at Google), but there's a similar(-ish) workflow I've been kind of missing from Plan 9, so I've been hammering on that a little. Something like `m1 client connect $remote_url --name $client_name` and `m1 workspace bind M: --client_name $client_name --name $workspace_name`, which is a slightly more obtuse take on running `9fs` to authenticate and bind the sources server into the current namespace.

I've found that, at the time of a client connecting, there's a lot of value for me in having, like, the last however many commit manifests and seldom much else as far as file data goes. I can pull down the raw blocks containing that data on demand, and at least for now, commit manifests contain a complete enumeration of what's in the file tree at that commit. That's enough for me to rehydrate a browsable filesystem projection of the repository before I decide that I need to mirror blocks locally.

> Long live CDC Update!

Yes! It's one of those things I've carried over to bitty box distributed environments.

> You posted before Steve's response[0]. Does that help?

It does a little, yeah, but I'll admit that I still feel somewhat teased by it rather than properly informed. As I wrote, I'm close enough to the technical details of this problem that I'm able to use my imagination. I wouldn't be surprised if some of my own proposed designs mesh up with what Steve and co. are doing.

I just want some more concrete messaging "from the horse's mouth," as it were, about what's being undertaken to mitigate shortcomings in Git's architecture for folks in the enterprise space of technology and procurement stripes alike who might find it an interesting contrast to GitHub Enterprise.

I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.

At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.

Oh, hey. Nice seeing you here. I appreciate your work blazing some interesting trails with graphs and weaves in distributed version control. (Though, I must admit that I'm still left sort of scratching my head at the concept in a bytestream-oriented world instead of in the record-oriented world where I have, say, a deck of JCL cards and for which record-level inclusions and exclusions make sense.)

My criticism of TFA is grounded less in refusing to tell us about the secret sauce than it is, uh, not giving us anything at all technologically substantive to chew on, I guess. I can certainly use my imagination given my own experience in these particular salt mines, and I know that Steve and team are good for the technology, but I'm nonetheless wondering who is intended to be TFA's audience.

I'll echo the other comments here: this article is really anemic on the details of how ERSC intends to retool Git for the future (beyond Jujutsu as a migration path) or why there isn't a place for Git (as we know it) in the future[0].

I happen to have technical context around this problem[1], and I was rather underwhelmed by the announcement. At least mention how much of a pain in the ass the pack-protocol wire format is! Give those of us who are technical and knee-deep in Git's business something to commiserate over!

That all said, Fossil mentioned! \o/

--

0: Yeah, they mention agentic development patterns and constraints that monorepo-oriented patterns run up against, but the details are handwaved away. What about agentic development patterns in particular stress Git out? For those of us who don't use agents or have limited exposure to them, this isn't especially obvious, but the usage patterns are almost certainly reflected in other uses of Git that small-ish shops would encounter.

1: I've even looked long and hard at possibly taking my own crack at reworking Git's object store to be instead more like an append-only log, with an eye toward alleviating some of the problems that, e.g., heavy GitOps workflows can sometimes cause, let alone the fervor around agentic development. Like, this space is ripe for someone to come in and do it better, but version control is a technical tool for technical people.

This is WalterBright's operative definition of a monopoly[0], and I'd agree that he's being either deliberately obtuse (perhaps via ideology?) or is misrepresenting history (perhaps also via ideology?).

I'm honestly fine with whatever definitions, but they need to be able to cross the chasm from concept to criterion in conjunction or disjunction to be useful as a means of discriminating. So far, Walter's proposed definitions for monopolies and free markets together fail this test even if they're separately some measure of fine, inaccuracies relative to their term-of-art counterparts notwithstanding.

--

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49617983

Does it? This is an empirical observation matched with a causal claim. How have you controlled for your confounding variables?

I mean, they don't exist by construction per your definitions. A free market is a market that lacks state intervention beyond what's required to enforce property rights, and a monopoly is a state-imposed single seller in a market.

A free market in this construction must necessarily lack monopolies. There is no counterfactual observation that could falsify the proposition because the definition of free market doesn't admit a counterexample.

Congratulations. That's an epistemic trap.

> Libertarianism is far more than just an economic system

Acknowledged. That nevertheless tends to be where my interest in it lies. Near as I can tell, I don't actually have much of an ideology; I wasn't raised to be political in the typical Anglo-American sense.

> I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar

This gets a little in the weeds about my conceptualization of the state, but here's the view from 10km high:

Caesar is a model of an institution that arises when coordination problems exceed the capacity of voluntary associations. He's an emergent response to complexity, and I tend to ask questions of him that are flavored more like, "What coordination problem requires coercion, if any, and how much coercion is actually necessary?"

(As it turns out, the answer looks something like "enough to prevent folks from killing each other." My Mennonite upbringing makes me inclined to add in "and perhaps enough to keep the trust of the congregation," but I'll admit that's probably less relevant for secular folks.)

> but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas.

Why is property yours in the first place? Property is a socially enforced exclusion, and a construction of a society out of that major tenet of noncoercion and enforcement of property rights is by some measure impossible.

> If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't.

This is definitionally impossible with Caesar.

> If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them

I feel like this ignores collective action. Persuading enough individuals to contribute voluntarily is itself a coordination mechanism, and it isn't obvious to me how it could produce the same equilibrium as collective provision.

If the benefit is broadly non-excludable, there's a familiar free rider problem, and at some point, "please persuade everyone gently and individually" isn't really a solution to the coordination problem. It instead kinda handwaves it away.

> not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.

Caesar isn't necessarily someone who happens to have more guns (though, typically, he tends to be). It's more important to consider that he's the head of an institution that is embedded in laws, norms, mores, folkways, consensus, trial of facts, bureaucracies, and behavioral expectations of individuals.

Moreover, coercion isn't even the defining feature of Caesar. It's just the backstop in his toolbox for solving coordination problems.

> Any tax seems heavy if the proceeds do not benefit the taxpayer.

I dunno, man. Caesar asks for his money, and I just give it to him. I don't really have much of a say.

> I regret not having a photographic memory.

That's fine. I don't have a photographic memory either; I just have a few boxes of 3x5 notecards and accompanying topic/source indices in a notebook.

> Why is that so hard to believe?

Economics isn't a game of make believe for me.

I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world.

In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling.

> Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand.

I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours.

My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease.

> (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)

"All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data?

> The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.

This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market.

I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.

I'm mostly trying to pick apart the epistemology of thinking about economic systems this way because, hey, maybe there's something that my professional background in the subject is blind to.

It isn't especially interesting to me to try devise frameworks for coercing Caesar to do one thing over another; Caesar's just going to do what Caesar's going to do. The most that I can do is hedge against needing to migrate again because this Caesar has decided, e.g., that staunch pacifism is treasonous.

Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?

If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?

> The Crown did not heavily tax the colonials.

Huh, did they not? After the Seven Years' War, the Currency Act of 1764 received assent, and it functionally required that public debts be paid in hard money. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, this was a little hard to come by in the colonies.

> Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.

I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.

> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.

I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend.

> The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.

This shows necessity but not sufficiency.