username332211

That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders.

This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.

Sorry.

https://www.maxwellanderson.com/pompeian-frescoes-in-the-met...

There are frescoes of statues[1] and architecture[2] in Pompeii. Feel free to compare them with the reproductions.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2232/fresco-of-a-statue-o...

Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.

On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)

It's a lot less interesting once you look trough the names of senior Russian officers - de Tolly, Bagration, von Benningsen, Wittgenstein, Osterman-Tolstoy.

One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.

You create things of concrete and tangible value. In the eyes of the many, that makes you unworthy of generosity.

If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?

If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.

"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.

> You absolutely have lost money. You haven't realized the losses, but you are definitely poorer and should re-evaluate your risk tolerances based on your current worth.

They say long ago somewhere far away an astrologer managed to cause a panic by predicting a devastating volcano. People didn't just flee, they sold their homes for nothing, because they were convinced their homes would be under 3 feet of lava soon.

And that brings us to the key question - is your home worth less, just because everyone on the same streat is selling their houses for pennies? Isn't the opinion of the USGS slightly more important than the opinions of the real estate market?

> There's also a willingness to be less upset humans making a mistake than a machine.

There's willingness to be upset at anyone with deep pockets who can be found accountable. And the motivations for that aren't emotional, they are purely material.

There's a reason why people have spent decades trying to find pharmacological cause for autism, in spite of the enormous amount of evidence that the condition is mostly hereditary.

And a very good reason why vaccines in America are exempt from the legal system.

I'm sorry but what?

Delaware law exclusively protects the interests of the board of directors. It allows for a unique provision - the hilariously misnamed "Shareholders Rights Plan" that enable a board of directors to issue shares as they please, in order to make sure every attempt at takeover isn't against the interests of the directors.

The only check on the power of the board in a Delaware corporation is the Delaware court of chancellery.

I agree, but I still suspect OpenAI and other LLM companies do stuff like that, when an example of a hallucination becomes popular.

If I see some example of an LLM saying dumb stuff here, I know it's going to be fixed quickly. If I encounter an example myself and refuse to share it, it may be fixed with a model upgrade in a few years. Or it may still exist.

Couldn't you just add a large number of repetitions of "There is no seahorse emoji." to the training set?

Edit: Come to think of it, training on a Q&A format is probably better - "Is there a seahorse emoji? No, there isn't."

South Korea isn't some sort of backwards nation and I'm sure it's chaebols share the same culture.

Having had unfortunate encounters with government IT in other countries I can bet that the root cause wasn't the national culture. It was the internal culture of "I want to do the same exact same thing I've always done until the day I retire."

Absent outside pressure, civil services across the word tend advance scientifically - one funeral (or retirement) at a time.

The crackdown on immigrants is just an excuse. The real reason is different, the government is out of money and it doesn't believe most of the current welfare bill goes to people in genuine need. (Hence why the previous misadventures of a left-wing government involved 2 attempts at cutting welfare - first the winter bonus for pensioners, then a type disability payments).

The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.

I really doubt that. America's Congress seems to have very little difficulty in debanking people all across Europe, and obviously, they have no access to any European identity system. Canada infamously froze the bank accounts of anyone donating to anti-government protest movements and it's one of the nations without a comprehensive identification system.

KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.

Do you happen to know how many of the interesting studies replicated? A book can cite of studies, but the principal conclusions could be based only on a small subset of the citations.

I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.

> It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers).

Given the prevailing trend of virtually all modern governments in the developed world that seems to be rather short-sighted. Who knows, if you won't be made a criminal for dissenting? Or for trying to keep your communication private?

> In principle, there is nothing really that wrong with a digital ID, as at the moment you have a bunch of UUIDs (mostly) so its not actually that hard to marry you up between departments.

It depends. Here's a nice example for you - A while ago the BBC ran a series on council house investigators and their cases. It was very clear for it, that councils don't routinely check whether a prospective council tenant (who'd eventually become a buyer) doesn't already own a property. No checks are done with HMRC for their income levels either.

Of course, if a future government just wants to round up dissidents and send them to camps, I'm sure it won't be that big of an issue. But as of right now, this is enough to stop routine fraud prevention, which is likely an immediate threat to far more people.

> Generally, yeah, to use the online government and financial services in Sweden need BankID, which is almost always on your mobile phone.

Can someone explain to me why phones seem to be considered more secure than online communication channels or desktops? The way I see it, it's a computing device you install all sorts of crap on, sourced from all sorts of questionably trustworthy sources (especially as all sort of retail companies have started moving from loyalty cards to apps).

The Estonian solution from the early 2000s - a dedicated identification device, seems far more secure and reasonable than the modern Swedish one. If any bank in my area started offering YubiKey in leu of app authentication, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.

Perhaps very many. Perhaps few. Perhaps none.

I'd like to sidestep the question, and ask, is lethal violence justified as a retaliation? But I'd like to ask that as an ethical, not as a strategic question.

Suppose the starts align and the omens are good. Imagine the assassination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would be highly beneficial to all your pet political issues. Would killing them be a good thing?

> As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years?

It's less about the murderer himself, and more about the high level of support he has. "Many of the rank and file in the Democratic coalition want you dead, but not to worry nearly all of them are cowards who'd never do anything about it." is cold comfort.

> And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.

Do I really need to go trough Reddit to find you people calling for the murder of "capitalists", right down to landlords and homeowners?

I'm sure the elites (if we could call them that) prefer to seem like they are being pressured by the Trump administration. It's better for business and it's safer that way. But their compliance comes a little too easy.

Those were efforts at preventing British colonies from becoming Soviet colonies, weren't they?

There was no effort to keep either Kenya or Malaysia as British. In Malaysia, the war continued after independence.

I have nagging the suspicion that the knowledge that a good portion of the population wants them dead is a slightly more significant factor in pushing elites to the Republican side compared to the Trump administration's threats.

> How many of those comments are bots?

Wasn't there a group cheering in front of the courtroom when the judge dropped the terrorism charge? Those people were not bots.

> How many people say things online they wouldn’t say in person?

Ohh, so lovely of them. I wonder how Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and ultimately Paul Graham feel, to know that the only reason why a good portion of the population doesn't advocate for their death is taqiyya?

Have you seen social media's reaction to that murderer Mangione?

Apart from the Suez crisis and the Rhodesian embargo was there any serious British attempt to maintain the empire after the second World War?

And yet, the culture of the realm is probably innocent even there. There are very sound financial reasons why nobody in that island aspires to work in any sort of science and engineering.

Similarly, if you are the sort of person interested in putting their capitals to productive use (as opposed to a downright parasic extraction of rents) , the best decision you could make is to place them across the sea. Or the ocean.

Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.

I also suspect that your (*) unwillingness to name the actual reasons for the loss of economic capability is the ultimate cause of what you are describing.

(*) And mine, if I'm to be honest.

Worse still, they want to sell it below market value, but they want to be paid as if they were selling tickets at market value.

I remember finding some story about a contract for Ke$ha or Kathy Perry or some other pop-concoction of the previous decade getting leaked (*) , and one of the ways in which the artist got paid was trough a percentage of the tickets to distribute trough unofficial resale channels.

The issue that spawned Ticketmaster is that as a class artists are greedy, but they want to pretend they aren't. Being hated is a vital part of that company's business model.

(*) I think it must have been Ke$ha, as that one was involved in some financial dispute, but I can't find the story right now.

And yet, I suspect if you look at the publications of "reliable" institutions in the 1980s, you'd find far more ridiculous things than you'd ever see in the modern era.

For one, half the things I see from that era had so much to gain from exaggerating the might and power of the Soviet Union. It's easy to dig up quotes and reports denying any sort of stagnation (and far worse - claiming economic growth higher than the west) as late as Andropov and Chernenko's premierships.