pjlegato

The comic is Creative Commons licensed - can you or someone else put this up on a hosting site?

Only the v1 naive customer service bot will attempt to be helpful at all times.

The better product managers will quickly pick up on the (measurable) user frustration generated that way, and from there it's technically trivial to alter the LLM prompts such that the bot simulates being annoyed in a plausible way when tested like this.

It's a long way from "this factory keeps tearing children limb from limb" to "there are too many car washes in this town."

I specifically said externalities are real problems that bear addressing.

The problem is that once politicians are turned loose, they never stop. They cannot stop. They can't say, "well done, problem solved, let's pack up and go home." That would mean giving up their hard-won power -- and the concominant benefits to themselves and their friends that came with it.

So they must always seek yet another supposed outrage to feed their power. When they can't find one, they manufacture one, to increasingly absurd and implausible lengths, eventually wrecking the system.

While acknowledging the reality of those externalities, it's also fair to point out that empowering politicians to attempt to override the market and deliberately police the negative outcomes of those externalities in favor of supposed social goods (the determination of which is, in itself, problematic) has never, ever worked in the history of humanity -- though it has been tried over and over in disparate societies around the world.

In practice, the politicians supposed to be looking out for the externality damage instead merely redirect outcomes to benefit themselves and their friends. The result is invariably worse than whatever damage is wrought by the open and free market.

This is not a failure or shortcoming of any one particular attempt to corral the market towards social good; it is an inevitable and expected broken-by-design outcome of attempting to do so.

Telegraphic ciphers and codes were common, both to save money through compression, and as it was well known that many people would be reading and re-transmitting the message as it worked its way through the system.

There were various standardized codebooks published for when the message was not secret and compression was the only consideration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...

Frequent telegraph users with an additional need for secrecy, such as investment bankers, developed similar proprietary in-house codebooks.

More and more people have begun to feel that carrying around a smartphone, being pervasively connected to the Internet at every moment, is a large net negative in their life. It detracts from immediate experience of one's actual physical environment, greatly but subtly.

So, some still want a device that is "just music," nothing else.

Those cases are well served by Clojure, which gives you the macros + a modern, professional, battle-tested standard library (via Java).

> Try passing these paternity leave policies as a law

These policies have been the law for many years in the United States, both at the federal level and (additionally and seperately) at the state level in nearly all states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_S...

Netscape didn't invent the web, its open protocol, or even the first browsers. They did not make the web happen.

Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.)

Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as a business.

Copyright does not last forever (even if it lasts longer than you may like.)

Mickey Mouse entered the public domain a few weeks ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/arts/public-domain-mickey...

They hired smart people not to monetize their genius, but to tarpit it: to eliminate the small chance that one of them might work at a startup and build something that threatened Google's cash mashine.

Socialism rewards psychopaths even more than capitalism does. In that system, the psychopaths quickly become the ones who define what those "guardrails" are, for their own personal benefit; and then use the full weight of state enforcement power to prevent any dissent.

At least under capitalism, the decentralized free market eventually erodes the ability of a corporation run by psychopaths to continue to operate, if not as fast as we might like.

That's the point. The economic growth rate that EU residents demand is NOT supported by its current economic structure and degree of financialization -- hence mass social unrest, which is getting worse every year. The current system cannot continue, one way or another.

Sure, the EU could turn into Cuba or North Korea and avoid financialization... but most people will not accept that sort of stagnation in their material conditions. They want a new iPhone, new clothes, new washer, new car, new coffeemaker, holiday in Spain, etc. All that costs money, and ever more money.

You also did not address the elephant in the room at all -- most of the costs of keeping the EU from turning into "Russia's westernmost oblast" fall on the taxpayers of the United States via NATO. Avoiding that outcome without what is essentially a large and ongoing annual donation from the financialized United States is not possible, at least without undergoing a similar degree of financialization in the EU.

It seems like you wish to enjoy the economic benefits of financialization (new iPhones, not living like Cuba, and also not being conquered by Russia next week) while at the same time morally disparaging those who make those benefits possible.

That's all well and good until your economy stagnates, GDP suffers, and all the vaunted social welfare programs are no longer affordable -- never mind covering the staggering actual costs of the EU's own defense against Russia, instead of offloading that cost to the US taxpayer via NATO.

If the "deep tech industry in Europe" refers to bloated, bureaucratic legacy enterprise software like SAP, European tech is doomed.

They only continue to exist because of cronyism, forced sales to large organizations through personal connections; and expertise at navigating the stifling local bureaucracies of their countries.

Those places aren't good at solving narrow problems. They are at best mediocre at addressing the problems of 40 years ago, at a price point far higher than smaller and more innovative companies could do so. They innovate approximately nothing in terms of product design or value added.

Nokia is another cautionary tale of what goes wrong with that model.

> in the US ... people here hardly read

This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.

This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.

What does the data say?

* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."

* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]

* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]

* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]

* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]

[1] https://wordsrated.com/global-book-sales-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/12358/which-countries-produce...

[3] https://internationalpublishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/... , page 17.

[4] https://masterenedicion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BookM...

Yes. The American Chestnut Foundation has been working on that for several decades; not quite there yet, but it's probably possible.

More at https://tacf.org/

They are a third sort, European chestnuts. They are generally held to be better flavor than the Asian varieties, but not as good as the nearly extinct (but not quite) American Chestnuts.

Parents looking for screen alternatives: Check out the book "Playborhood" by Mike Lanza.

His neighborhood had no kids playing outside, so his kids didn't want to play outside. He did something about it, and he tells us how to do the same where we live.

https://playborhood.com/

Merely disagreeing with liberal or progressive viewpoints does not, in itself, render someone "a bigot."

Ha, agreed fully that the "old internet" was far more of a cesspool than most care to remember. We look back with rose-colored glasses. We remember the good and forget the bad.

USENET was not only every bit as bad as the worst of 4chan -- it was worse, because there was no effective moderation.

That said, there was also a large "signal" component in the "old internet" that is now lacking in most of the New Internet. Places like HN remain as lonely outposts of that lost world, where people wrote in entire paragraphs, to convey complex and meaningful ideas for mutual discussion -- rather than just firing punchy little 140 character epithets and 10 second insta-videos off into the void and then forgetting about them, moving on to the next flash in the goldfish attention span pan.

That level of sustained, complex actually seems like it was more common on the "old Internet," even recognizing fully that the "old Internet" was also overflowing with dross and garbage.

The ones who are power-tripping are bad. The ones who genuinely believe that their rules-lawyering is actually good and beneficial for the whole community are even worse.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis

Dang is good at a lot of moderator things, but his best attribute is that he seems to be capable of disentangling his own personal views on a topic from enforcement of objective norms of decency and respect. Less than 1% of people can do that; they prefer to bludgeon people with technicalities in order to enforce their own views -- and most believe that they are doing good when they do it.

Twitter is not dead; it rather caters to a different and broader audience segment now.

What happened is that it is no longer an institutionally governed "safe space" where only leftist progressive views are allowed to be voiced in public, and any dissenting views were censored.

The segment of people who think that applying that sort of leftist ideological purity filter on all public discourse is a good thing are leaving, while another (and ultimately much larger) segment of the public who highly value free speech are joining.

That's rather eloquently romantic, but doesn't actually seem to mean anything beyond "it requires some ineffable quality of vague goodness that just FEELS right to me, I know it when I see it."

What can be done besides "emotional feedback subjective gut check on how it makes me feel" when we propose to analyze the scenario?

This problem has recurred throughout history.

The issue with the "study this person who does it well, take notes, it takes a village!" approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants who don't actually understand (or care about) the principles behind whatever that person did. They instead engage in endless rules lawyering about technical minutiae. Some do it simply to feel powerful; others genuinely feel that rules lawyering is helpful.

This becomes self-amplifying as those who actually care about the underlying principles and themes, as opposed to petty legalism, tend to leave the project permanently and go elsewhere. Meanwhile, those who care about and prioritize bureaucratic bickering are attracted to the project, eventually attain a larger share of the powerful positions, and build more of the same.

See the evolution of Wikipedia for a great example of this process in action.

The cost of living varies widely in different areas. In many parts of the United States, 100k is a very low salary, due to extremely high living costs.

For example, the government classifies a family of four with an income of $149,100 as "low income" in San Francisco, and thus eligible for government welfare benefits.[1]

The median house price in San Francisco is currently $1.3 million.[2]

An average 776 square foot apartment (which is rather small for a family of four) rents for $3,336 a month.[3]

[1] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/grants-and-f...

[2] https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/housing-m...

[3] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa...

That would be theoretically possible, yes; but all proposals along those lines so far have been met with staunch and bipartisan political opposition. Attempting to alter the retirement age seems to be political toxic waste.

Too many people here use the drive-by "downvote" as a means of expressing their disagreement. This comment is a perfectly rational and polite contribution to an on-topic intellectual discussion of retirement, yet has received a large number of downvotes.

People, if you disagree, that's fine, but make some kind of a (polite, rational) counterargument rather than abusing "downvote" to express your visceral disgust at becoming aware of an opinion that differs from your own.

This is a common and fundamentally incorrect misconception about Social Security. Many subsequent policy debates are then misinformed.

Your money is not ever saved for you. Your retirement is NOT funded by your own past taxes. Your retirement is funded by those younger people who are then working and paying taxes.

You can see the details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund

Payments to retirees are made out of _currently incoming funds_. That is, the money paid in taxes by people currently working is immediately distributed to retired people who are receiving Social Security payments.

It is, in other words, NOT a savings plan. Full stop.

This scheme sort of worked in the 1930s when life expectancies were much lower and only a few people survived to retirement age relative to the much larger number of working people paying taxes.

Since 2009, Social Security has operated at an annual loss: the amount paid out has begun to exceed the incoming taxes. The deficit is expected to increase a lot in the coming years. (See https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...)

Whatever you may think about whether Social Security is a good idea or whether the goverment ought to provide for retirement, it's clear that the current structure is not going to do that for much longer. A large-scale reform of some kind is coming.

This is a common stereotype, but wholly inaccurate on both sides. We in the West are coming out of a long cultural period several centuries where that sort of analytic, rational style has been particularly popular, so it's easy to mistakenly assume that it is representative of the entirety of Western philosophy. It's not.

Likewise, we in the west are in a period when certain specific Eastern philosophies, notably Buddhism and Taoism, have become widely known and popular for the first time in the West. It's easy to mistakenly assume that they are representative of the entirety of Eastern philosophy. They're not.

Western philosophy has a deep and broad mystical and esoteric tradition that routinely does what you describe as an essentially "eastern" practice. More recently, postmodernism discards all that analytic precision in favor of vague impressionistic primacy for one's personal experience, and has become by far the dominant philosophy in many parts of the west. Postmodernism was (according to its progenitor Martin Heidegger, who was incidentally a Nazi) explicitly and profoundly influenced by Taoism.

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, has its own well-developed "excruciating pedantic detail" traditions such as Legalism[1] (among others) that routinely do what you describe as an essentially "western" practice. They have been profoundly influential in Asian thought, yet they are not currently popular in the West, so we just don't think about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy)