philwelch

“Viking” isn’t a matter of heredity though. If your grandfather was a bricklayer, you’re not a bricklayer as a matter of heredity, you have to actually lay bricks. Likewise, if your grandfather was a viking, you have to actually go raiding and pillaging to be one yourself. Which is not something you’re likely to do if the king of France gave your grandfather an entire duchy in exchange for a promise to stop doing that sort of thing.

> Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.

They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight. But yes, 18 wheelers are worse.

Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.

At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.

Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.

Is that true? The whole point of per capita is to cancel out the linear benefit of 100 million workers being able to outproduce 10 million workers. There are ways for small countries to have a per capita GDP higher than would be feasible for a larger country, but Taiwan doesn’t really do any of those. They don’t have oil or any other particularly valuable natural resources, and they aren’t a tax shelter like Ireland or a microstate with workers commuting across the border like Luxembourg. They have to create wealth the hard way, through labor productivity, just like the mainland. And between the two, the mainland has the potential to realize greater economies of scale.

By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.

I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.

Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.

This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.

It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.

The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.

Every communist regime that collapsed was in the process of liberalizing, except Romania, which wasn’t overthrown peacefully.

China didn’t collapse in 1989 because they were the only communist regime able and willing to massacre protestors.

How many of those African regimes sponsor terrorism and piracy against Americans, or adopt “death to America” as a motto?

Wikipedia describes it as a “a short-lived Kurdish self-governing unrecognized state in present-day Iran” and “a puppet state of the Soviet Union”. Doesn’t really count as a free and independent state.

This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protests with overwhelming force. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are likely to have some overwhelming force on their side soon.

I have direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim that parachutes improve the safety of jumping out of airplanes.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

I thought red light was recommended for nighttime because it doesn’t interfere with natural night vision.

That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.

Of course, but it's best to do both if possible.

I have no intention of spending my childrens' inheritance selfishly extending my own life, and I'm grateful to live somewhere I still have that choice. The people of New Zealand and the Netherlands have my sympathy and I hope they one day have the same freedom of choice.

And if I was emperor, I would abolish payroll taxes and phase out Social Security. Unfortunately, we live in a democracy.

Money can be passed down to your children and grandchildren though.

The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work.

There is a minimum age to collect old age benefits from the government. The justification for that should be obvious.

The social security trust fund does buy government bonds.

> The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a minimum of 2.6%).

Social Security is effectively the same thing. Payroll taxes are collected and placed in the social security trust fund, which invests them in federal bonds.

In evaporative cooling, the warmer particles are more prone to evaporate and escape leaving the remaining substance cooler than it was. Likewise, as individuals with more of a libertarian or founder-sympathizing mindset stopped contributing to HN as much, the overall tone of the site turned more negative against business and successful founders.[1] I don't want to speculate too much on why they started leaving--I hope it's because they all got too busy being successful founders--but once the effect started to happen and HN turned into less and less of a site for founders to discuss their startups and turned more and more into the proverbial peanut gallery, I think a feedback loop started pushing more of them away.

mftrhu is probably correct in attributing the origin of the analogy but I don't specifically remember where I got it from and I think some of the examples EY gives in that essay would be uncalled for to apply as a direct analogy to HN. HN was never a doomsday cult and I'm not even trying to say that all of the smart and reasonable people left HN, but rather that there was a specific attitude and mentality that's not well represented here anymore.

[1] This is oversimplified. Classic HN still had lots of people complaining about big tech companies, it's just that the criticism was usually voiced from the perspective of another founder rather than from the perspective of a progressive critic. For instance, I remember lots of complaints about Apple's arbitrary and capricious App Store policies, but then that directly affects the startup founder who wants to build an iPhone app.

My mistake, I knew he was aware of and commented on the parallel but I misremembered the details.

They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up.

Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.

It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.

That was a very conscious and deliberate homage.

There’s no “typhon” in this thread. Did you mean “typon”? I did reread his comment; it expressed a negative view of a specific generational cohort rather than old people in general.

> I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs.

If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor.

> Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges.

Maybe we’ll do that too someday.

> This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it

With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.

> I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system.

A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.

> It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.

There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.

> Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?

Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.

The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).

There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.