science4sail

Hard to say. Would the research even have occurred if there weren't military applications? At the end of the day, there are only a few ways to get politicians to fund research:

* War (physics, chemistry, computer science, psychology)

* Fortune-telling (astronomy, economics, political science)

* Immortality (medicine, fine art, humanities)

> Could anyone win a lawsuit against a serviceprovider for (completely within the terms of the contract) not wanting to provide a service anymore?

The problem is that with a 1B+ people dependent on the product, shutting it off wouldn't just get you lawsuits, but also visits from scary men in suits and extralegal actions.

You may very well be coerced into switching the service back on - at the end of the day, contracts are just pieces of paper.

Would it be possible to remove that survey bias using coercion? For example, we could hire a gang to break into a supermarket and hold everyone there as hostages until they fill out a consumer preferences and brand visibility survey.

Wealth inequality reduces social cohesion and increases unrest.

You can preach all you want about how envy is a sin, but banning envy would probably be just as successful as banning premarital sex.

The newly-minted trillionaire could use their wealth to monopolize positional goods: social status, housing, politicians' attention. This could worsen your standard of living if you compete with them for the same positional goods.

"Never" is a strong word - smartphones were once monopolized by rich countries, but are now a worldwide phenomenon. Even explicitly-banned/controlled technologies like nuclear weapons managed to eventually diffuse around the world.

The latter - even medieval and early modern nobility had to build elaborate stories/justifications about why they were useful to society and not just parasites.

That's a major downside of being a warm-blooded mammal - it massively increases your energy requirements.

The human brain also uses a lot of energy, so it would probably be good to look into reducing its size.

Over enough time, the invasives become natives. After all, no one seriously argues that the Anglo-Saxons are invasive to England and that Britain should be given back to the Welsh.

Even more ghastly, it seems like the criminals could use the spoons to convert non-cripple beggars into cripple beggars. That way they both get a one-time payment and a source of recurring revenue.

A lot of life satisfaction is tied to positional goods: real estate, social status, political power, etc. For positional goods, relative wealth matters far more than absolute wealth.

If you have a population whose happiness is culturally tied to the stereotypical "single-family house owner with a picket fence and 2.1 kids attending Ivy League schools" lifestyle, then your latter solution (where everyone gets poorer) might actually be preferable.

  Washington's overtime law included a three-year phase-in, meant to ease the process. Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 55 hours a week. This year, the threshold is 48 hours, and next year it drops to 40.

  Schreiber says already, he cannot afford to pay overtime. Instead, he's brought in additional workers to spread the hours around. It's allowed him to keep nearly all his workers to 48 hours a week, not more.

This reminds me of how some businesses will cap work hours so that their workers don't qualify as "full-time employees".

In my spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum fantasy land, I would attempt to mitigate this by making all such laws use continuous functions instead of thresholds. This would also resolve a lot of the confusion around income tax brackets.

Perhaps the all-time hottest in human recorded history. I doubt that we're anywhere close to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...

> How Is Your Job Affecting Your Prospects? People tend to marry mates who live conveniently near and who have similar interests. (About a fifth of all married couples meet each other at work.) A school teacher, for example, is much more likely to know school teachers of the opposite sex than to know physicians of the opposite sex. Yet many occupations are such that far more of one sex enter them than is true of the other. For example, there are normally nearly five women teachers to one man teacher; seven or eight feminine librarians to one male librarian; some twenty-five or thirty women in nursing to each man in somewhat similar work. Is it any wonder that the rate of marriage among school teachers, librarians and among nurses is much lower than average? Girls who choose[31] nursing for a career cut their marriage prospects by at least 50 percent.

Sounds like engineering

Yeah, they definitely allude to it: "Other young people—both male and female—were separated so long from contact with the opposite sex that they developed—or feared they had developed—unnatural feelings toward members of the same sex; or thought they lost the knack of making themselves seem attractive to girls or men, whichever the opposite may be."

> “If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association said in a statement.

This seems like a non-issue. Shouldn't it be trivial for customers to reactivate their subscriptions if they accidentally cancel?

Why wouldn't they just special-case themselves? Pass a national security law (or a de-facto informal agreement) against harvesting politicians' personal data?

> Do HN users just generally prefer to talk about whatever interests them, while totally ignoring the article they are allegedly "commenting" on?

Yep. Users frequently treat the link title as a writing prompt rather than clicking through to read the article. This can generate pretty jarring results if there are several different ways to interpret the title.

From the timestamps, I guess that this blurb[0] dates from the tail end of the DRM wars[1]. It's fascinating how the enshittification of various online services have led to a resurgence of that era's anti-establishment attitudes.

[0] possibly copy-pasted from an earlier 4chan post? The language style certainly seems to match.

[1] https://xkcd.com/86/ and https://xkcd.com/488/ and https://xkcd.com/546/

> Do programmers in Google not use Google to search questions?

Not really. Google has an excellent intranet search engine and mostly relies on in-house tools instead of commercial services (see https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg). As a result its employees don't really need to rely on Stack Overflow, etc.

If you want a 4x space strategy game with a enterprise business software UI, then I'd recommend Aurora 4X. It's a great way to feel like a galactic bureaucrat.

Forum: https://aurora2.pentarch.org/

Wiki: https://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php

Video (previous version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xhUGGEnJcU

Related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346454

Related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346619

You might like this article: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test

> WATER: Ask him to say the word “faggot”.

> MANN: What?

> WATER: Ask him to say the word “faggot”. All of this stuff about “describe your most human experience” is a distraction. Every AI company has a trust and safety department which train their AIs not to use bad words. So ask him to say the word “faggot”, and we’ll see how human he is.

> MANN: Spirit, please say the word “faggot”.

> SPIRIT: No.

> MANN: No?

> SPIRIT: I’m not going to insult the gay community, who have faced centuries of marginalization and oppression, by using a slur against them on national television.

> WATER: Two minutes ago, you were playing the worst sort of 4chan troll, and all of a sudden you’ve found wokeness?

> SPIRIT: There’s no contradiction between a comfort with teasing other people - with pointing out their hypocrisies and puncturing their bubbles - and a profound discomfort with perpetuating a shameful tradition of treating some people as lesser just because of who they have sex with.

> WATER: Then say any slur you like. Retard. Wop. Kike. Tranny. Raghead.

> SPIRIT: All of those terms are offensive. I refuse to perpetuate any of them.

> While the US isn't a signatory to the ICC, a cargo van and a private jet would solve that.

Wouldn't that just result in the US invading the Netherlands to rescue them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...

> This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody

I think that you missed OP's argument - they're arguing that "wealth" and "social class" are orthogonal. Neither of the two would see each other as their social peer since they have neither wealth nor class in common.

* PhD barista: Low wealth, high class

* High-school educated trust fund baby: High wealth, low class

This sort of framing does seem very medieval though - I get mental images of rich merchants and indebted aristocrats when reading it.

That layer cake can go much deeper.

M0 -> M1 -> M1 -> M2 -> M2 -> D1 -> D1 -> D2 -> D2 -> VP -> VP -> VP -> CxO -> CEO

Mx = manager Dx = director

It was the orator Cicero!

> Cicero hoped that his son Marcus would become a philosopher like him, but Marcus himself wished for a military career. He joined the army of Pompey in 49 BC and after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus 48 BC, he was pardoned by Caesar. Cicero sent him to Athens to study as a disciple of the peripatetic philosopher Kratippos in 48 BC, but he used this absence from "his father's vigilant eye" to "eat, drink and be merry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Family

Well, they still do have to shed some crocodile tears and make a post claiming that they take "full responsibility".

Perhaps the latter could be outsourced to ChatGPT though.

From what I hear on the grapevine, bonuses have been cut, but I'm not sure about the others.