suoduandao3

Right, but their own population isn't currently having trouble importing food (that I know of). Farm subsidies are essentially a form of insurance against famine.

If the Museum originally got it from someone who stole it from somewhere else, there's a reasonable argument to be made.

James Acaster's comedy bit on the british museum comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73PkUvArJY&pp=ygUcamFtZXMgY...

Fair... though I would point out there are reasons governments might want to support citizens who make food more than citizens who make widgets.

It's funny - prior to this thread I didn't realize the protests were over subsidies. Definitely a case of seeing my own filter bubbles.

Genuine question, what do you think comparing debt loads of established vs startup companies should tell me?

I think the point is, Farmers as a group were peaceful until very recently. Law abiding citizens don't riot because Mars stationed direct.

I like Bill Burr's quote here - "A dog should not bite a man. But if a dog does bite a man, it's fair to ask what he was doing when it bit him"

I don't 'do' Apple, neither do the vast majority of my friends.

But, having used a borrowed mac product in the past, I do recognize that using them is just... pleasant. Not enough to justify the higher price point, but the superior user experience isn't just marketing.

No... but functional currencies aren't free either.

If a miner could run a heat pump via a Stirling engine it'd be even better.

I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title and an alternate way to refer to it.

I do believe that Tesla's success in the last decade was in large part due to the fact it was the only technology company that could use all the money people were throwing at technology companies.

Like a lot of nerdy scifi writers, NS's characters can come off a little... archetypal rather than complex or subtle. It's a lot more pronounced in his shorter works, as there's a lot more internal dialogue in his longer ones - if you find that a deal breaker, it's not confined to the start of the book.

It might help to think of the characters as archetypal because he's writing about the future and these archetypes will be present in the future - the people who make history will seem a bit cartoonish because they'll be more extreme in their behaviour.

And if that doesn't satisfy you might still like his longer books like Anathem - the characters were still recognizeable there, but there was a lot more humanity to their behaviour.

The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. I was intrigued to learn it's also one of the top recommended books by Tim Ferris guests. I wonder how many separate reasons there were for that.

I agree... but it's important to recognize that the smaller the difference between one's pay and one's expenses, the more impact any kind of disruption has. 'don't go bankrupt' isn't a requirement with a lot of leeway - the leeway to take risks comes when losing a job wouldn't lead to immediate bankruptcy.

I was going to respond that much of music is also poetical, but AI is actually decent in that realm too - albeit it with a lot of supervision.

From 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPs6wdM7S3U

The best rebuttal I've heard to this line of thinking is: "Some say we lost Afghanistan because we weren't willing to be brutal enough. Well, the Russians were willing to be brutal enough, yet they also lost Afghanistan."

Here's the first I found:

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=4cf111c139290637JmltdHM9MTcwN...

That line of reasoning seems pretty silly given that consciousness is supposed to be much more subtle than electromagnetic fluctuations and omnipresent, but it reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where the most difficult practices are only done deep in mountain caves where no light can reach the practitioner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if minimizing cosmic background radiation was a factor in sufficiently subtle inner inquiry.

One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.

Loneliness is a human instinct based on our evolutionary history as social primates though - if you travel up the antennae enough that there's no 'others' there's also no evolutionary pressures to make that loneliness a source of danger.

But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can also look up the antenna and find all the security it could want - where I think some religions err is that when this happens, if you keep identifying with the insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication between the two.

I quite like Penrose-Hameroff's theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU

My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience.

As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.

right but most of those men weren't samurai, were they? The Samurai were basically responsible for raising a private army in times of war like that, they were the first point of defense if someone threatened their people in peace times but they also brought fighting men along when their lord needed it.

Feudal social structures are just very counterintuitive to us. We think of is as being a job but it was a lot more built on personal relationships than that, and a Samurai's relationships with his inferiors depended largely on effectively scaring away unpopular criminals. That's why I say it's a role more like a police officer's than a soldier's, but it was really quite unlike either.

I think a point we forget when we think of the 'Samurai' or other 'armed nobility' classes like the European knight is that they were much more similar to police than soldiers in a modern analogue. Their job was to enforce the peace in a mostly peaceful place and deter violent crime, not really to fight on equal footing with other armed nobility. In war time, they were the most effective one on one fighters but far more important was their ability to raise a group of retainers who'd follow them into battle.

And if I'm not, then neither is an Ai?..

Right, but if I look at your sculpture and get ideas on how to make a better sculpture, then make an entirely different sculpture using yours as inspiration, and you get upset that I'm 'copying your style' we generally don't give you much sympathy.

How is it 'stolen' if it was part of a public dataset? Is the argument that OpenAI was scraping data that should have been behind a paywall?

>capitalism will not offer any incentive to feed the AI with new, creative things.

Disney is already following that thesis without AI, yet it's never looked so vulnerable to the whims of the free market.

Those countries can already pirate that data with minimal effort. The only way to keep that kind of data out of your rivals' hands is via trade secrets.

Given that high interest rates mean it's very advantageous to have money, might interest rates just be a leading indicator of wealth inequality?

>War is avoided if one party is so strong that an attack is futile.

Did you mean to write 'if both parties are so strong an attack is futile'? A stronger party can always attack a weaker party if it feels it has more to gain than lose by doing so. The US was briefly the only party in a position to do that, but there's clearly an interest by regional powers to expand their territory. I see the invasion of Ukraine as an excellent example of that.

In that light, supporting an insurgency against economic rivals seems like a pretty decent strategy - done well it can make the cost of invading a weaker rival unpalatable on all sides, without contributing to the praetorian guard problem.

The trouble I think becomes, it's possible to pull the smaller party's backers into a situation where it can be an avenue to wage economic war against them. The petrodollar is essentially over at this point, in large part because of how the Ukraine war shaped out. Supporting the smaller side in an asymmetric war is traditionally more capital efficient than being the larger party, but that isn't obviously the case in Ukraine. I'm definitely watching this space.

centrists are probably generally less fearful as retreating to one extreme of a polarized dynamic is a common fear response. But I think the point is more, everyone is partially motivated by fear, sometimes governments use that fear as a lever.

Destructive arguments can also have the benefit of strengthening the arguer, like sparring in a gym makes me more confident in a dive bar. I wrote my first book after months of habitually arguing on a mongolian basket weaving forum and deciding to put that energy towards a project. I'd never have started the project without building the habit of passionately writing at a certain time of day.

If your friends don't have more access to knowledge than you at least 50% of the time, maybe it's time to make some new friends.